Alissa Wilkinson

As a drama, Woman of the Hour is effective and infuriating.

The movie is gentle, almost sluggish, and takes some weird left turns — in other words, it’s a Jarmusch film. Zombies suddenly turn up. People are dying. The world is ending. And by now, we’re more or less expecting it.

Late Night feels underwritten in some spots, but it’s surprising in others — an unfussy, entertaining comedy with some serious matters on its mind.

Elvis as a metaphor for America is a genius of an idea, and that central theme of Promised Land really works, even though it feels sometimes like the musician’s life is being edited and bent to fit a narrative.

By the end of the story, the film’s aims are clear: to show what an absolute miracle the rescue was, and to honor the extraordinary cooperation and selflessness of those who came to help. Yes, that’s inspirational. But it also quietly counters a Hollywood history besotted with lone rangers and mavericks. Everyone matters.

It’s all jocular and surface-level, but it’s also not trying to be anything more than old-fashioned blockbuster entertainment — neither overly serious nor, on occasion, allergic to a bit of sentimentality.

Inevitably, the results do not quite cohere narratively or tonally. But the film still has a strange, old-fashioned charm. You can’t really imagine anyone other than Clooney playing Jay, but Sandler is equally good; he brings a pathos to Ron, a man who has perhaps loved not wisely but too well.

Despite its flaws, the film works because it’s not, in the end, contrived.

It’s a sweet-tempered film that celebrates the animals we love and seems to have a secondary purpose, too: to convince viewers to support and even develop a love for animal rescue.

While the film often feels like a slow-motion real-world horror story, it’s not without hope. For Brazil, liberty once existed. Can it exist again? And what does that mean for the rest of the world?

This exceptionally well-cast version of Tammy Faye’s story does manage to tap into a cultural moment with reverberations we continue to feel today.

So in not sacrificing that human element, Bumblebee is a nostalgic delight that taps into not just the 1980s but youth in general.

Most of the filmmaking in My Dead Friend Zoe feels workmanlike, proficient and straightforward in its storytelling — a promising feature debut for Hausmann-Stokes. The film’s best feature is its performances from a uniformly excellent cast.

The film’s stripped-down aesthetic is mirrored in the actors’ performances; they deliver straightforward lines with a hint of self-consciousness and discomfort, even between friends and lovers. It’s as if the closeness is projected through a scrim, which creates a kind of purposeful clumsiness the audience can feel, too. When actual physical contact occurs, it’s almost jarring.

Careening from office comedy to something like horror, Sorry to Bother You is weird and funny and unsettling, and not quite like anything I’ve seen before.

One of Good Boys’ smartest insights into that period of life is that everyone is developing into their teenaged selves, but at very different speeds.

As “Eric LaRue” starts barreling toward an upsetting conclusion, you start to wonder about everything that’s happened earlier in the movie, about what went unsaid and now refuses to stay quiet.

The movie feels very lived-in, the banter fresh and funny, even if sometimes it feels like it’s standing in place a bit too long

While writer-director Brad Bird’s Incredibles 2 is undeniably a good time at the movies for the whole family, it’s the rare superhero movie that may have too many ideas knocking around in its noggin, none of which seem terribly coherent. And that, in the end, makes the film less than it clearly wants to be.

There’s just a lot here. But with a subject like Field, the mild chaos feels pleasantly appropriate.

Though it verges on the overstuffed at times, Vivarium is dirty, sinister, hair-raising, and thoroughly entertaining — and completely worth a watch if you’re feeling a little, well, trapped.

These men are so lonely. Thankfully, in a movie, they’re also really funny.

For the most part, it works. Blockers isn’t groundbreaking or particularly memorable. As comedies go, it’s pretty standard fare. But its characters and performances keep it light on its feet, even when the writing gets clunky.

It’s better than most of the entertainment aimed at children that studios churn out these days.

Jawline is both disturbing and empathetic, and an important peek into the glory and angst of being a teenager on the internet today.

The point isn’t the data, but the spider-web nature of the argument; seemingly disparate things (labor strikes, slave patrols, the removal of Indigenous Americans from their land) are drawn together in “Power,” which becomes an act of pattern recognition. It is not easy viewing, but it’s a strong introduction to a topic that seems freshly relevant every day.

Food and Country, it turns out, is aptly titled: caring about how we get our food and what we do with it isn’t just about culinary creativity. It’s about caring for our neighbors, our country and the world.

House of Gucci is probably the funniest comedy and dopiest tragedy of the year. Everyone chomps on the scenery.

The world that Elliot creates is so strangely beautiful that it’s fun to look at. Plus, the end of “Memoir of a Snail” redeems its flights into tedium by giving us a reason to have watched them.

If Bullet Train is a hit, this may be the cause; it’s pure escapism at its finest, with no message or lesson at its core.

In Trump’s America, most people watching Netflix already have their minds made up about journalists — they may trust them, or they may think they’re the scum of the earth. Nobody Speak is a stirring argument that could sway some of the undecided viewers.

When the source material was so fun, the cover is bound to be enjoyable, and this one is, even if it sags a little around the two-thirds mark. There’s punning, and contraptions, and ducks that shoot lasers out of their eyes. It’s a good time.

Tarantino, famously obsessed with the history of cinema and its preservation, has recreated a world he wishes he could have worked in with such care and skill and love that, for the most part, it feels like his most personal film. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is lots of fun, but it’s also strangely, hauntingly sad.

The film succeeds on the radically subversive and obvious notions we learned when we were children: that being nice is not a weakness; that speaking with care is a thing we do simply because we believe the person we’re talking to is a human being with worth and dignity. What’s most startling about Won’t You Be My Neighbor, and what makes it feel almost elegiac, is how very jarring that message feels.

By those standards, Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is disappointing, and more of a puff piece than I suspect Walters herself would have wanted. Yet seen through a different lens, it’s also fascinating — a rather thrilling history of television journalism, as seen through Walters’s life.

Shari & Lamb Chop is a charming introduction to a remarkable artist and the characters she created, which have endured across generations because they reflect the playfulness at the heart of their creator.

Under the Silver Lake isn’t an homage so much as a remix of classic Hollywood tropes, which positions itself and its contemporary hipster characters less as the continuation of history than the end of it.

It’s loaded with fun and sometimes funny set pieces and enough danger to keep you on your toes.

There’s nothing flashy or innovative about On the Basis of Sex. It’s the very definition of a workmanlike film. But it’s a satisfying watch nonetheless, and a smart one too — just like its subject.

Really, though, the reason to watch Bugonia is its leads.

The movie is full of goofy side characters and one-liners, yet elevated occasionally to genuine complexity by Colman and Buckley, who are consistently the best thing about any movie they’re in.

In a wide-ranging and somewhat rambling manner, it is about humans’ desperation to find meaning in life wherever they can, and how companies are rushing to fill that gap and inspire almost religious devotion, even in the professionals making the tools.

Ultimately, the film is not just a wild and nearly unbelievable story; it’s a rumination on the lasting effects of sexual abuse, the complicated question of “good” lies, and the moral quandary that comes along with withholding painful information.

The film skirts gimmicks to go in a more tricky and unsettling direction. It’s an almost soulful portrait of the artist under capitalism, rather than another exposé on robotics and artificial intelligence.

It’s clear that the movie has a point of view; what’s most interesting, though, is the raw materials it employs.

Crip Camp is buoyant and inspiring, a tale of people working together through difficulty and opposition to change the world.

It’s a fable, really, with a science-nerd edge and some charming animal friends. You could do a whole lot worse at the movies.

There’s no denying that Widows is entertaining. Partly familiar and partly something all its own, the film still stumbles at times. But when it works, it’s enthralling.

It’s as much a story of love among friends as it is of any couple, and a handful of good gags and great performances keep the whole thing steaming along.

More than once, I was struck by how authentically 40 Solène seemed to me — a woman capable of making her own decisions, even ones she thinks might be ill-advised — and how weirdly rare it is to see that kind of character in a movie.

The performances in A Quiet Place Part II make it very watchable, when combined with some heart-pounding action scenes that deploy the presence or absence of sound to ramp up the anxiety.

Cult documentaries are so popular that I’m a little surprised the film didn’t head more heavily in that direction. But the chorus of voices in the movie makes it clear that consumers should be paying attention. And it’s obvious, too, that the problem is much bigger than Brandy Melville.

In resisting the urge to paint its subject as a saint, Roadrunner gives us something better: a human.

The film is a little too sprightly to land any heavy punches — it’s more of a comedy with satirical elements than a true satirical tale. ... But hate can be both worthy of ridicule and deadly serious, and for the most part Jojo Rabbit manages to thread that needle.

Moore still suffers from bouts of self-aggrandizement and snide generalization. But they feel jarringly out of place, and in a good way. That’s because, for a great deal of the film, Moore cedes the floor to people whose voices are not as easily heard, or who have had to fight to have a voice at all.

The Legend of Ochi is light on story — you kind of know what’s going to happen all the time — and that, coupled with occasionally garbled dialogue, makes it easy to zone out at times. But in its place it serves up a nourishing banquet for the senses.

The joy of Glass Onion is that you can read into it, or just let it flow over you and enjoy the ride.

The Other Side of the Wind is best viewed as a meta-drama about Welles, laced with a barbed wit.

With interviews, clips, commentary, and more, the documentary serves as a quick primer on Welles as well as the film.

Lost in the Jungle can’t really explain how the children survived, or how, ultimately, they were rescued. Miracles and mysteries happen in the jungle. What the film does elucidate, in rich and tense storytelling, is that no headline story like this is ever as simple as it seems on the surface.

You actually come away from Netflix’s Fyre feeling like you’ve got a sense of who McFarland is and why he was able to con so many people into giving him their time, respect, and millions in cash.

Even if you’re confused or mystified by the whole concept of cryptocurrency, the movie is a pretty solid introduction to how it works. More important, it explains why people got into it in the first place.

What Godzilla vs. Kong lacks in narrative logic, it makes up in visual fun, even imagination. And that’s all too lacking in an industry dominated by movies that sacrifice imagery for story beats.

Most good films rely on their audiences to connect the dots a little, but Happy End is all dots, with none of the lines drawn in at all. The meaning is there, but you have to dig for it in the everyday events of a family’s life.

For Anderson purists and couture aficionados, Phantom Thread is still a feast. But for many others, it’s likely to feel, at times, like it’s gotten a bit too bound up in its own stitching.

Borrowing on certain familiar erotic thriller tropes — let’s all point and stare at the cray-cray lady — it does some back flips and corkscrews appropriate for our time and lands with a cathartic smack.

Blood-soaked and intense, it is occasionally uneven in tone, with varying degrees of skill from the cast. But story-wise, it mostly holds together, a thinker of a thriller that, even when it heads into pure slasher territory, still has its brain turned on.

The nervy electricity and joy of the film, arriving at this moment in time, is an unbeatable combo. It’s hard to imagine a movie-hungry audience returning to the theater and not being swept away.

Alex Wheatle plays like a conventional coming-of-age story, of sorts, but the film is a fitting addition to Small Axe, rounding out a picture of young manhood and serving up powerful images of isolation and courage.

No Time to Die exists to wrap up lots of plot lines — it feels, like 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, like the end of a cycle, a grand epic about sacrifice and the future of mankind. But it also gives us a Bond with more emotion and maybe even humanity than many of his predecessors seemed to possess.

The Pod Generation foregrounds Rachel and Alvy’s relationship, exploring how technologies change our most intimate connections and raising questions from a world not so unlike our own.

Secret Mall Apartment makes a compelling case that the project reverberates through the lives of the artists, and maybe even the city, to this day. Art doesn’t have to be in a museum to be valuable; it doesn’t have to be own-able, repeatable or even make sense to everyone. If it changes a few lives, then it’s changed the world.

There are times when the film veers too near the maudlin for comfort, but it always finds its way back to something spare and meaningful.

Comedy was not really his subject. Laughter wasn’t either. Instead, a few interviewees suggest, it was time — a part of existence we normally take for granted. Kaufman had a preternatural ability to remain unperturbed by time passing, even when his audience became disgruntled, hostile or upset.

Despite its charms, and it is frequently charming, Twinless also succumbs to some of the issues that tend to plague movies of this type, the small and clever dark comedy about young people having big feelings.

Beautiful Boy is a beautifully made and complex rendering of a father and son’s relationship that ends with too little hope to fit into people’s “inspirational movie” box. But at its best, it’s a strong rendering of both that horror and the frayed rays of hope that sometimes break through. It’s not easy to watch, but it is, in its own way, still beautiful.

Zinging between humor and poignance with a lot of charm, it achieves in its most insightful moments what comedy does best: Let us laugh at the world a little, by way of learning something about ourselves.

In the end, I Think We’re Alone Now isn’t very interested in constructing a mythology or exploring the apocalypse itself. It’s more of a relationship drama, one that works as a showcase for two great performances against a post-apocalyptic backdrop that ups the stakes

Somehow it works — probably because The Platform commits to its conceptual framework so thoroughly, and with such precision, that it coaxes the audience to do the same. Its vivid images are designed to imprint on your brain.

The irony of My First Film is its two layers: It’s not Anger’s first film, nor is it Vita’s, but it tells the story of one that never quite made it into the world. But really, it’s a movie about learning to have compassion for your younger self, for her dreams and foibles and failures.

Watching Air, I found myself thinking that maybe what Hollywood needs is a movie like this: fresh, fun, full of movie stars doing their movie star thing without the aid of capes or pre-chewed IP, opening only in theaters. A story about risk-taking that could prove the reward was worth it. A weird, wild sneaker of a movie, if you will.

What’s great about the movie is its performances. John David Washington brings fire to his role, matched by Deadwyler’s coolly furious resolve. Jackson’s role has him mostly observing, but he’s a magnetic presence. And Fisher is phenomenal, embodying a character who seems oblivious and a little dense but, it turns out, is more than meets the eye. Still, as a film, The Piano Lesson is the weakest of the Denzel Washington-produced Pittsburgh Cycle.

Coming 2 America is really just a movie about how fun and great Coming to America was. It gives us another way to dance to the prior movie’s beat.

There’s a wealth of lovely performances in Bird, including Adams, who holds the film together by slowly taking on tenderness as it progresses. But the two poles of the movie are Rogowski and Keoghan, who radiate precisely opposite energies.

It’s become a lazy critical cliché to declare that a film is a love letter to a city or to the past or to cinema, but in this case it’s inescapable, and Belfast succeeds in passing that love along to us.

Knock Down the House is the rare documentary about today’s American political landscape that might make you shed happy tears.

What it does do, though, is remind us that bad men get away with bad things in part because we’re conditioned, over and over, to see them as normal and funny, permutations of “locker room talk” and “just making a joke.”

Movies like this one are just looking for an audience with whom they’ll resonate. And the seriousness of The Way Back — its unwillingness to take the easy road, and Affleck’s total commitment to letting his personal rawness inform performed pain — should ensure those audiences find what they’re looking for.

Alpha is definitely sentimental, even pandering at times. But its unexpected setting, images, set pieces, and even language balance out the sentimentality with a strangely raw and cinematically adventurous aesthetic that’s uncommon for a film of its sort.

The farce props up the nihilism, and gives The Monkey a strangely hopeful refrain.

I stumbled into the night after Jackass Forever with aching cheeks from laughing, a sore derriere from sitting, and a little bit of gratitude to inhabit a planet with people who don’t mind being fools on purpose

The result isn’t uplifting in the least. But it’s deliciously frightening, a cautionary tale for the careless and a horror film that posits a world devoid of any real goodness.

What does work about H Is for Hawk (aside from Mabel, whose presence is enough to recommend the film) is its refusal to make grief facile or tidy, or to proclaim that healing must look the same for everyone.

It’s true that every documentary about a musician made with their involvement functions, on some level, as a piece of marketing, an attempt to write the narrative of their life. That mode can get a bit wearying. But when the results are this endearing, it feels like a little celebration instead.

While Coco brings a lot of sweetness and light with it (and, undoubtedly, a lot of happy tears), not one story beat includes something to startle the adults in the audience into realizing something new. No movie has to do that. But Pixar once was reliably in the business of making indelible cinematic crowd pleasers — and now it feels like it’s settling into something much more routine.

Taken together, the movies are a meditation on middle age and mortality, on how our irrevocable life choices, even when they’re the right ones, will haunt us for the rest of our lives.

It’s an interesting (if not in-depth) exploration of how culturally dependent a thing comedy really is. It’s a vivid depiction of the challenges that black entertainers have faced, particularly in Hollywood. And it is, to everyone’s delight, a great Eddie Murphy performance.

It’s a piercing look into a country that’s becoming less and less inhabitable for its older men and women, and more stingy about who gets to dream. And, fundamentally, it’s a poignant portrait of a broken heart.