Alissa Wilkinson

The Emoji Movie is a waste of time, resources, and a bunch of comedians’ voices, plus a premise that actually had the potential to do some small good in the world. It’s less of a movie and more of an insult.

The reason films like Detroit are important isn’t just because they remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same; it’s because watching them forces us to tread moral ground alongside the characters.

Dunkirk wants us to sense what made this moment so pivotal without reducing it to an individual tale. And at that, it succeeds richly.

War for the Planet of the Apes is the rare blockbuster that’s both entertaining and full of complexity.

A Ghost Story isn’t all sorrow and grief. There’s a kind of deadpan humor throughout — the sheet ghost is comical, and there’s no getting around it — that complicates the film and rewards a rewatch.

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.

By letting the past speak for itself, The Reagan Show stays both sober and light on its feet.

If you can adjust to the idea that you’re not meant to sympathize with anyone, Lady Macbeth is quite a film.

The Big Sick feels authentic because it isn’t afraid of complexity.

The Journey is the rare hopeful political film rooted in both reality and very recent history.

Unfortunately, the thinness of The Hero gives Elliott little to work with, and he’s already a subtle actor, with a mustache and hound dog visage that tends to obscure facial expressions anyhow.

The Florida Project won’t let us look away. Nor, given its brilliance, would we want to. Instead, we laugh, we watch silently, and we’re challenged to stop simplifying people's lives so we can offer easy theoretical answers.

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.

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.

Visages, Villages is quite a moving film, and speaks to a particular cultural mindset that knits art into the fabric of public life.

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.

It’s not a great film, but it’s interesting one.

As a film, The Beguiled is thrilling, delicious, wicked fun.

Alien: Covenant would probably be a better movie if it had calmed down and narrowed its scope. And yet you have to respect Scott’s ambition, even if you don’t like his movie.

Unfortunately, it’s not a great film. But it’s an enjoyable one, if you like fine wine, beautiful countrysides, and a little frisson of flirtation.

We rarely get to see Sandler do this kind of straight-faced comedy, and he's so good in The Meyerowitz Stories that he deserves the chance to do more.

Okja isn’t perfect; it falls down when the absurd and the serious ricochet back and forth between scenes, making it hard to track with the film’s tone. But it’s easily forgivable; this is a big, ambitious movie, and when it works, it is ridiculously fun.

It trusts its audience, adult and child alike, to feel its theme, to knit themselves into its multigenerational fabric.

Terrific concert documentary...The film that resulted — a roughly though not strictly chronological document of the much-publicized event — is an outstanding documentary, a joyful musical experience and a playful artifact of an era. [2019]

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.

Craig Gillespie’s take on Tonya’s story, the hilarious and gut-punching I, Tonya, is a nearly pitch-perfect black comedy that distills the sensational story into two potent insights very relevant to 2017. It’s a movie about class, and it’s a movie about the nature of truth. And somehow it’s also a supremely entertaining sports movie.

Private Life is an accessible and complex portrait of two people whose ardent shared desire for a child leads them in some unconventional directions, and it’s a joy to watch whether or not you’ve shared their experience.

In The Tale, Fox takes an experience that’s far, far too common — and newly visible in American culture — and mines it for its emotional heft, turning it into an interrogation of how those who’ve experienced assault and abuse go on to navigate their lives. It is a story of a woman taking her life back, nested in a film serving the same purpose.