Alissa Wilkinson

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.

The story here is about more than just the ballet: It’s about the people who are stepping into the spotlight.

Maybe telling the whole story doesn’t mean living happily ever after, but at least it can mean being a little wiser.

The best plays are often more situation than plot. They capture, unravel, and singe the edges of the power struggles between people who are standing on shifting sand, letting the upper hand change from moment to moment. In retaining the feel of a play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom hangs onto that inherently theatrical quality.

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

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.

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.

Good Grief does that rare, beautiful thing: It trusts the audience to pay attention.

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

Murphy, fresh off his “Oppenheimer” Oscar win, is both producer and star of this film. His performance is unsurprisingly searing and nuanced, especially since Bill is not much of a talker.

Chilly, precisely designed scenes make for a sharp juxtaposition with images of blood, violence, and birth. And the feeling that something very wrong is going on here is inscribed into every exacting, unnerving shot.

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

Slay the Dragon isn’t a glorified PowerPoint presentation about the history of voting. It’s an unabashed activist documentary aimed at convincing viewers they can fight gerrymandering in their home states.

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.

Yu’s direction is confident, and he manages to convey how a little apartment can transform from domestic comfort by day to claustrophobic agony by night. His restraint throughout keeps us guessing.

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.

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.

Lo’s construction of each person’s story grants them dignity and compassion. And their agreement at the end speaks volumes about what they saw in the film, too.

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

There’s an uncommon sweetness to this film, which is less about running away from something and more about discovering the road of life is littered with goodness, if you know where to look.

Crazy Rich Asians is fun, funny, gorgeous, and swoon-worthy. It’s got a terrific cast, glamorous locations, witty jokes, and a story with a lot of heart. And on top of all that, it may actually succeed in proving to Hollywood that both Asian-centered stories and romantic comedies deserve much more attention.

Meddeb keeps her focus on several young Sudanese activists. It’s a wise choice, creating an intimate portrait of their dreams and fears.

It probes how the act of co-opting idealisms and converting them to dogmas has occurred many times over. What’s more, it points directly at the immense danger of romanticizing the past, imagining that if we could only reclaim and reframe and resurrect history, our present problems would be solved.

It’s overstuffed, and thus skims and skitters across the surface of everything it touches, only glancing here and there before it’s taking off to the next story beat, the next exquisitely detailed composition.

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.

Among its contemporaries, John Wick, in a word, rules.

Pope Francis — A Man of His Word isn’t likely to convert any of Francis’s critics, but it might just convince the indifferent that he has something to say to our world.