Alissa Wilkinson

Occasionally the movie feels like it’s lost its direction, stuffing a little too much into its story and deflating the ferocity of its central metaphor. But there’s a great sense of humor in Tiger Stripes, particularly in Zairizal’s impish performance, and the swing between fear and hilarity make for an engrossing ride.

A quintessentially Aardman-esque stew of slapstick, homage, and wordplay so wry it barely (but always) misses being groan-worthy, Early Man is a gentle and modest reflection on how we have, from the very beginning, always needed to treat one another with kindness in order to survive.

Harvest, which takes place over one week’s time, is gorgeous and strange and a bit winding, though not unpleasantly so.

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.

If we learn anything from the story in Richard Jewell, it’s that truth is truth, whether or not it fits your pet narrative. So either the movie fails at understanding its own message, or it flat-out lies. What a disappointing way to undermine your own valid point, in a movie that’s otherwise well-acted and competently filmed.

After a while, the movie plays like a bulleted list of everything wrong with America — fair enough — but hurled so relentlessly at the audience that you can only assume the goal is for anyone watching the movie to find something they agree with. In the onslaught, the narrative tension dulls into passivity, both for us and for the characters.

The Wedding Banquet is so charming, and then so unexpectedly moving, that its strengths eventually outweigh the bits of mess.

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.

Thank You for Your Service is moving and unflinchingly honest — and its release comes at a time when its central theme feels depressingly relevant.

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.

A movie like this one, reserved and a little mysterious, can be unnerving. Occasionally it feels as if Sometimes I Think About Dying is a bit too withholding, dragging down the story it has to tell. But there’s a lot here to like.

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

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.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a “Deadpool” movie, which means it’s rude and irreverent, funny and disgusting, weird and a little sweet. Reynolds and Jackman are fun to watch, in part because their on-screen characters contrast so violently with their nice guy personas off screen.

The film is smartly designed to deliver its message into as many hearts as possible.

As both a story on its own and a prequel to a whole bunch of others, this movie must introduce us to a variety of characters we’ll meet later, and it does it without feeling too much like fan service or exposition.

Like many documentaries of this sort, “Merchant Ivory” opts to be a survey without a thesis — informative, even engaging, but lacking an argument that might drive the documentary itself forward.

Haigh is a tremendously lyrical filmmaker, and All of Us Strangers unfolds in a space that seems like a dream, or a hallucination, pulsing with the rippling soul rush of love turning a life from monochrome to full color.

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

Its plot is hacky; it’s got some really clunky characters; the dialogue is, at times, unthinkably stupid. (“The way of water connects all things” is the kind of line that sounds profound until you really think about it.) But this new Avatar filled an awe-shaped void in my heart, and for that, I thank James Cameron.

Brigsby Bear is about how the things we love help us find where we belong.

It’s a slow-burn horror film, one that has all the sudden scares and moments of pristine fear present in any good movie of its ilk. But in the hands of Lenny Abrahamson (Room), The Little Stranger is elevated by measured pacing that also makes the larger house-based metaphor clear — and the result is both elegiac and frightening.

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.

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.

It’s an evenhanded and surprisingly entertaining account of how things got so bad, who was to blame, the way it was fixed (to some degree) and what New York inevitably lost in the process.

The Great Hack isn’t revealing much that hasn’t been reported elsewhere, but it’s powerful in the ways it does so.

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.

If the franchise wants to be more than a shell of its former self, it’s going to need to recapture the wonder so many felt as kids, or adults, when faced with something so beautifully grand as a dinosaur.