Alissa Wilkinson

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

The break between Colm and Pádraic works on its own terms, but it’s also a startlingly violent fight between men who are basically brothers, a fight that has a logic to it and yet is heartbreaking precisely because of the depth of history between them. It’s the conflict in microcosm.

What Descendant demonstrates is how ignoring the real story — the ship sunk to the bottom of the river by people who find its truths uncomfortable — doesn’t just steal people’s history from them. It impoverishes the future. More than that: without facing the past with courage, exploring it without succumbing to emotional panic, there is no future.

To watch Tár properly requires mental recursion. The surface of each scene is perfectly legible, but the full import of what you’re watching is elusive till the end of the scene, or even the sequence. The end of the film recasts everything that’s come before it. It’s like Kierkegaard’s old saw, embodied: Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

The film shows the birth of the militarization of police in America.

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.

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.

Nope is a big, very loud, very effects-driven spectacle. It’s a movie with a thousand references to the past. It’s also a riotously entertaining thrill ride that owes portions of its plot to some of Hollywood’s most successful summer blockbusters, Jaws and Independence Day. It’s part of the culture; it can’t stand outside of it. But it functions at least a little bit as a warning, or maybe a prophecy, or a call for a reboot, or a reminder to care about what, or who, gets our attention.

Men is the most visceral and organic dive into the curse of human nature that [Garland's] made yet. But it’s like each of his movies, filling in the question of what it means to be human — and to keep living on this planet — stroke by stroke.

Eggers recreated, with obsessive accuracy, the world of the medievals in order to lower us into a myth that feels primordial and strange, as if it’s tapping into something in the back of our minds that we’ve always known but half forgotten.

Portraying a lie as the truth so forcefully, so unrelentingly, that people just believe it is a key to understanding Loznitsa’s portrait of the region.

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 movie captures the spirit of the novel well. It’s suspenseful, but it’s not a thriller; there are elements of obsession and eroticism, but they never quite go where you expect. The end is deeply ambiguous, neither punishing nor condoning its characters’ behavior. It simply asks us to sit with them — to pay them the respect of attention, and learn something about ourselves in the process.

It’s a tonally strange movie from the get-go, masquerading as a typical holiday flick about long-lost friends getting together at the holidays but ending with mass extinction. Yay!

For me, the bludgeoning tends to blunt the entertainment value.

The film moves slowly at times, and that’s entirely on purpose. Cinema is primarily a visual medium, and Dune provides a terrific opportunity to lean in and experience what that really means.

One of 2021’s best movies.

By the end, it seems telling his story — saying it out loud in a safe space, at last — may have helped Amin heal a bit more. Perhaps sharing it with audiences opens the same space for others, too.

Its rough-hewn, side-glancing characters are full of secrets and unspoken intentions, thinking thoughts it didn’t even occur to you to imagine are in their heads. It’s a gothic thriller wrapped in a Western. It’s outstanding.

The film, which is structured as a series of set pieces that Alana and Gary stumble into and out of, is far too strange and specific and sometimes cringey to simply be made up, even by someone with as fertile an imagination as Anderson.

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

The result is cool, elegant, and devastating, a film as tightly woven and plaintive as the source novel itself. It’s an artifact of its time, both 1929 and in 2021, when the questions around identity have morphed and shifted but are still relevant as ever.

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.

In letting them retell those stories their way, and asking us to watch, Procession dares its audience to not look away. It calls us, in other words, to join the healing community, not just with vague aspirations but with our actual eyes. To play our roles as audience members and then take what we learn and bring it to others.

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.

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.

There is, indeed, an explanation — but I kind of wish there wasn’t. For most of Old, the sheer weirdness of the setup is what’s so compelling.

To be fair, it’s not all unpleasant. The joyride through the Warner Bros. IP universe is not quite as soul-busting as the trailer led me to believe it would be, though I suspect it benefited only in comparison to my expectations.