Alissa Wilkinson

Ad Astra is beautiful, contemplative, and loaded with meaning — not an action movie, but one that leaves you with plenty to ponder.

Parasite is an unpredictable, thought-provoking masterpiece about inequality.

Marriage Story sees the end of a marriage as cause for both mourning and bittersweet comedy. The relationship is changing, but not ending. And the evolution is something to behold. To get a story like this right requires a sense of the comical and the absurd along with the devastating — and Marriage Story delivers.

This film invites us into Rogers’ philosophy that adults would be better people if they tried to remember what it was like to be children. It gently coaxes the audience to filter some very adult emotions through the familiar characters and songs and stories of Rogers’ world. The result is unexpected and unlike any film of its kind, and a testimony to Rogers’ enduring influence, too.

Joker is a well-made movie, with a killer performance from Joaquin Phoenix, who seems born to play the role. But there’s nothing “bonkers” about it. It has nothing to say about the Joker himself or what he represents, or even about the world in which his brand of evil exists. Go ahead and crack open the movie. It’s hollow to the core.

I think I’d rather re-read The Goldfinch than watch it again. Straughan’s screenplay strips out most of the novel’s heart in favor of plot fidelity, albeit with the pieces told out of order. No longer does it feel like we’re on a journey with Theo. Instead, we’re just observing what happened to him during his life, and there’s no reason to care about any of it.

It’s the most finely tuned version of a murder mystery you could hope for, with joyous performances and style in spades.

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.

It’s an intensely personal project for writer and star Shia LaBeouf, one that walks a thin tightrope, but pays off beautifully.

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

Waves earns its grace-filled ending by asking us to live alongside a trial by fire. It sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it: You walk out with a weary, cleansed soul.

American Factory tackles the challenges of globalization with much more depth and nuance than most reporting on the topic, precisely because it steps back to watch a story unfold over time and resists easy generalizations. It’s both soberly instructive and fascinating.

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

Ready or Not takes its name from a game, an amusement for children, but it has something to say about some very grown-up concerns. And it’s both fun and deadly serious.

Bernadette is a soggy misfire, with sparks of possibility peppering a weirdly plodding tale.

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.

The movie's arguments and implications for policy are a matter of life and death, and yet it’s the images that stayed with me after 13th.

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

So The Lion King now has its very own pristine cover album, rendered in intricate, realistic detail, a high-fidelity B-side for its many devoted fans. But it might, in the end, leave you wishing for the slightly scuffed-up vinyl original.

Grief and love coexist in The Farewell, as do truth and fiction, past and present, sorrow and joy. It’s an outstanding, quietly devastating, deeply personal story, and one that’s destined to put Wang firmly on the map.

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?

There’s no cutting away from the disturbing in Midsommar (in fact, the camera prefers to push into the worst of it); you will look at this, and you will see the violence that is life and death, the movie says.

Murder Mystery does feel like a very specific sort of direct-to-Netflix offering, designed to ape other movies you’ve already seen and enjoyed without straying too far from the formula or doing anything particularly innovative. But it does so cleverly enough to make watching it a pleasure.

Most of all, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a love letter — not a romantic one, but the kind you write when you can no longer hold on to a relationship that nonetheless shaped you profoundly. Richly textured and vividly rendered, it’s clearly the fruit of a lifelong love.

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

When you’re a teenager, you project your feelings onto the world, sure that you’re in the right and everyone is out to get you. But in reality, your biggest enemy is usually yourself. Booksmart taps into that truth and makes it memorably relatable in a way that goes far beyond the cap, gown, and college acceptance letters.

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 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.