Alissa Wilkinson

Mother! is a mad fantasia of fire and water and insanity, a spinning, flaming plume that is not here to make you like it, though it wouldn’t mind if you decided to just bow down in worship.

The movie is a pure delight — a funny, fast-paced, heartfelt story of a friendship and a weird dream. Impressively, it will satisfy fans of The Room while remaining completely accessible to those who’ve never seen it.

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

It’s an interesting (if not in-depth) exploration of how culturally dependent a thing comedy really is. It’s a vivid depiction of the challenges that black entertainers have faced, particularly in Hollywood. And it is, to everyone’s delight, a great Eddie Murphy performance.

The low-key and never very mainstream Pavement seems like the last band that would get this treatment, and that’s the joke. But it also makes the band the perfect subject for what Pavements is slyly doing, and quite brilliantly, too.

While his celebrity has largely faded, Bernstein’s Wall makes the case that his charge to artists to lead the way in culture is timeless, and more vital than ever.

In Asteroid City, Anderson builds several worlds mediated by layers of performance, artifice, and technology, in which nonetheless real humans grieve, long for one another, fall in love, get hurt, and feel wonder. The layers they’ve put between themselves and their emotions crack and crumble.

It felt a bit like the life was draining away from the movie the longer it went on — as if this was more of an imitation of a good movie than an actually good movie. (The technical name for this among critics is a “nothingburger.”)

The landscape in which this family makes its domestic life is wild and lovely, and Palmason signals the changing of the seasons by showing us all of its beauty: the snow and ice, the sunshine and greenery, beautiful skies, placid water. The weather can be both delightful and harsh, warm and chilly, and that’s mirrored in the characters.

The Fire Inside has a little more going on under the hood than your average sports movie.

Kennedy sticks largely to conventional documentary techniques for Queen of Chess, which is not a bad thing: It’s a good story, well told, and Polgar makes for an interesting subject.

The Zucheros bring a great deal of imagination to the task, and the sheer audacity of the movie is enough to make it worth watching, even if, at times, the gadgets’ sentimental education starts to feel repetitive.

To the degree it works — and it does, a lot of the time — it’s a testament to its performers, especially Gordon and, once she arrives on the scene, Viswanathan, both of whom bring an energy to the screen that always has a touch of mischief, like they could veer off into lunacy or ecstasy at any time.

Most of the filmmaking in My Dead Friend Zoe feels workmanlike, proficient and straightforward in its storytelling — a promising feature debut for Hausmann-Stokes. The film’s best feature is its performances from a uniformly excellent cast.

It’s not just a fascinating glimpse into a woman who spent her whole life in the spotlight. It’s a chronicle of a moment when everything changed, and a sobering reminder that we often think we know who public figures are, but we rarely really understand.

The single most useful insight of Get Me Roger Stone is that men like Stone are driven not so much by ideology as by an overweening thirst for power and celebrity, propelled by absolute antipathy for their enemies.

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.

Kahn manages to assemble the story in a way that escapes feeling like a series of object lessons.

It’s funny. It’s uncomfortable. And it feels real and lived-in, right to the bone.

Oldman is excellent in the movie, playing a jolly, idiosyncratic, sometimes conflicted version of the British prime minister. But the movie Oldman is in isn’t as good as his performance. Darkest Hour is certainly engaging during its run time, but it’s weirdly forgettable after the fact.

Santosh is equally about the methods by which the poor and oppressed are kept in their place, and about what it means to be woman among men who aren’t at all interested in sharing their power.

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.

The film is a confident debut from two writers and a director with no shortage of things to say and a strong voice to say them in.

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.

Kurzel favors stylized images and the occasional anachronistic metal track to provoke a mood more than faithfully recreate history. And his approach works well in this film, bolstered by a strong cast, which features MacKay, Russell Crowe, Nicholas Hoult, Charlie Hunnam, Thomasin McKenzie, and Essie Davis.

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

It’s as much about reframing middle-aged regrets as it is a story about youth, love and possibility — and thus the emotional heft it wields is two-pronged.

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