Alissa Wilkinson

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.