Alison Willmore

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

You can’t stop art, motherfuckers, and whether it’s in Grand Theft Auto Online or during a global pandemic, the show must go on.

Rye Lane asks you to fall in love with Dom and Yas, but failing that, it will have you hopelessly smitten with its South London setting and with that feeling of having the day open and nothing to do but wander and see what may happen. With the city spread before you, you never know who you might meet.

There are surprises to be found in The Holdovers, but they come from the characters, not the story — from the ways each of the three main figures reveals new depths and confounds expectations.

The Northman doesn’t invite its viewers into its world, but instead dares them to try to catch up.

The result is scruffily endearing, though it teeters on the verge of collapse at times, as the pretense that what’s unfolding onscreen is all a serendipitous journey gets stretched to the breaking point.

The frustrating thing about Fingernails, which is directed by Christos Nikou from a script he wrote with Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner, is that it’s so disconnected from the physical side of romance even as it has an intensely anatomical phenomenon at its center.

Everything Everywhere All at Once may be a kaleidoscopic fantasy battle across space, time, genres, and emotions, but it’s an incredibly moving family drama first.

The literary world jabs are sharp and funny, but it’s the rueful family dynamics that make the film so rewarding, as well as the performances.

The film also comes across like a rough cut that was never looked at as a coherent whole, and some segments that start off as promising become interminable while others feel entirely unnecessary. There's no pressure on or expectation for Tarantino to please anyone other than himself, and the film feels overstuffed with ideas that should have been pruned.

Glass Onion is bigger and more precisely designed than Knives Out, but what makes it a more satisfying movie is that it sits with its characters more rather than immediately showing off their decay.

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.

A Thousand and One is rich and complex overall, the saga of someone battling to build a family and a stable home with no real experience of what that looks like.

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.

The adaptation frames the relationship it depicts less as a romance than as the intersection of two individuals in their own moments of transition. It’s a much better movie for it, though I’d guess that one of the reasons it’s getting such a quiet release is that it’s not a desperate melodrama about people trying to save each other.

Like most of West’s films, X is not particularly ambitious in its psychology or storytelling. It’s his technique that makes his work feel like it has one foot in the arthouse, with its elegant compositions and the way the camera moves as though daring us to see something the characters have yet to spot.

Like so much of Reichardt’s output, The Mastermind feels modest when you’re watching it and downright brilliant once it’s had some time to settle in your mind.

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.

It’s warm and inveigling, but what it could use is a little more emotional ugliness.

For all the undercurrents about fame, commodification, and reputation that flow through The Christophers, at its core is a more plaintive lament about what it feels like to love something that doesn’t love you back.

Union is a rare thing — a documentary that is undeniably political in its focus while being artful and observational in its approach.

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.

There’s a streak of defensiveness to Barbie, as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made, which renders it emotionally inert despite the efforts at wackiness.

It overflows with intriguing ideas, even if they aren’t all fully explored.

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.

It’s the sly way that the film starts off lodged in one character’s perspective, and makes its way to the other’s, that enables its rollicking final act to work as well as it does. Sleep is a wild ride, but it refuses to lose sight of the emotional state of the people it puts onscreen, even as they fall apart.

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

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