Anthony Lane

Luckily, Ferguson is fabulous in the role. She and Curran take possession of the tale and save it with sprightliness; their smiles arise without warning. I only wish that Rose had been around when Jack Torrance was on the rampage. What a lovely couple they’d have made.

Bale is a cussed and calculating actor, yet he’s never been more likable than he is here — an irony to relish, since the character he plays makes so little effort to be liked.

That blend of tones, with near-farce and emotional brutality blitzed together, is pure Baumbach, and he dishes it up for two hours straight.

Despite the déjà vu, there is plenty to savor in Miller’s film, and the final third, in particular, is quite the light show.

If I had to define The Irishman, I would say that it’s basically “Wild Strawberries” with handguns. Like Bergman’s film, from 1957, this one is structured around a road trip.

It’s no surprise that the film should so often stumble and trip, yet I would sooner watch it again and sort through my mixed feelings about it than revisit, say, the nullity of “Joker.” There is genuine zest in the unease of Jojo Rabbit, and it’s weirdly convincing as a portrait of childhood under surreal strain.

Dafoe and Pattinson have the stage pretty much to themselves, and the result is a beguiling crunch of styles.

Gemini Man is largely a sad affair. Fans of double characters should stick with Austin Powers, who, in “The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999), enjoys the rare privilege of meeting the person he was ten minutes ago. “You,” he says, “are adorable.”

Bong, in short, is a merchant of stealth. There is no more frenzy in the editing of Parasite than there are shudders in the motion of the camera, and, as with Hitchcock, such feline prowling toys with us and claws us into complicity with deeds that we might otherwise fear or scorn.

The unholy clash of pageantry and squalor is finely framed; warriors in silvery helmets, shot from high above, and gleaming in the murk, resemble a nest of wood lice.

What is involved here, in other words, is a tradition of truthtelling, with a long and honorable reach. The new film, like the old painting, is a stubborn, unvain, yet beautiful description of a man whose illusions are failing along with his mortal health, but who is somehow revived and saved by the act of describing. The glory flows from the pain.

Such is the strenuous effort of Phoenix’s performance that it becomes exhausting to behold.

Downton Abbey concludes with both Lady Edith and Daisy uttering the sacred words “I’m happy.” Upstairs and downstairs, in perfect concord: believe that, and you’ll believe anything.

How can a parable that set out to take the side of little people, versus gargantuan greed, end up using them as disposable comic fodder?

What Landes has done is to revise, and to render yet starker, the premise of “Lord of the Flies.”

Ad Astra is Gray’s most formidable paradox to date, liable to leave you awed, confused, and sad. It is a work of calculated grandeur, and, if you get the chance to catch it in IMAX, and thus to revel in the breadth of its beauty, do so. But there’s something small at the movie’s core.

At once breakneck and tolerant, Give Me Liberty manages to be both rousingly Russian and touchingly all-American. The Cold War is officially over.

This mixture of poverty and fantasy will not be for everyone. Compare the angry reaction to Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados,” when it came out, in 1950; not content with revealing the plight of destitute children, in Mexico City, Buñuel had the temerity to swerve into nightmare.

Good Boys is worth catching for those rare and wrenching points at which emotional honesty breaks through.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette has to be seen, and demands to be believed, because of Cate Blanchett. Like “Blue Jasmine” (2013), which earned her a second Oscar, this new film lies at her command.

For novices, the film will serve as a lively, if annoying, introduction to the Hammarskjöld mystery, yet there’s a sadness here. The more we are encouraged to puzzle over the darkness of his death, the less heed will be paid to his illuminating life.

The longer that After the Wedding goes on, the more it concentrates on the woes of white folk, to the exclusion of all else, and you gradually realize that the Third World, far from being a source of cultural tension, isn’t even a backdrop to minor domestic events on the East Coast.

The movie simmers with a longing for revenge, frequently boiling over, and the foe is not just Hawkins but the colonialist order for which he stands: barbarism, thinly disguised as civilization. Many scenes feel punishingly hard to watch.

Cars and songs. To be exact: the sight of a car bowling along, at speed, while a song cries out on the soundtrack. That, in the end, is what Quentin Tarantino loves more than anything; more than crappy old TV shows, more than boxes of cereal, more than violence so rabid that it practically foams, and more, if you can believe it,than the joys of logorrhea. His latest work, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, is a declaration of that love.

Honeyland swarms with difficult, ancient truths about parents, children, greed, respect, and the need for husbandry.

I happen to find the live-action Disney reboots easy to admire but hard to warm to — supremely unlovable, indeed, and stripped of the consoling charm that we look for in their animated sources.

The movie is compact, coolly heartwarming, and gratifyingly uncute. Be warned, though, it also leaves you starving.

From the opening shot of Ophelia adrift in a river, in mimicry of Millais’s famous painting, the film seems to splash around in search of a suitable style. The drama is no longer a tragedy but a fairy tale — almost, at times, a farce.

The movie is fun, largely because it proposes that fun is the principal legacy of the Beatles.

As Rose-Lynn, stomping along in white cowboy boots, she is ballsy and fiery, at once wised up and dangerously immature.

As Cooley’s film quickens and deepens, we get a fabulous running joke about the “inner voice,” a staple of American self-will since the days of Emerson.

The killings pile up, yet Jarmusch, the master of mellowdrama, would rather die than be accused of overkill. His heart isn’t really in the blood and guts. The line between the laid-back and the listless, in The Dead Don’t Die, may be too fine even for him, and most of the running gags don’t run at all, merely loping around in a circle.

Dougherty isn’t quite sure whether to wow us with the hulking immensity of the action scenes or to wag his finger at us for the environmental hubris of our species.

Egerton is busy and fizzy in the leading role, but there’s a curious blankness in his impersonation, and a shortage of charm. Hard to tell whether viewers will flock to him as they did to Rami Malek, who gave such electric life to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Yet Rocketman is the better film. Not by much, but just enough.

Yet Ritchie has made significant alterations. First, he has modified the law of sultanic succession by giving women the right to rule. Second, by some cunning spell, he has taken all the fun from the earlier Disney film and — abracadabra! — made it disappear. The big musical numbers strain for pizzazz. The action sequences are a confounding rush.

The film grows into a caustic comedy, rife with fidgety questions.

This is Hogg’s most disconcerting work to date. Like her previous movies, such as “Unrelated” (2007), it proceeds in lengthy takes, and the camera, more often than not, prefers to keep its distance, the better to observe her characters — the human animals — at play.

Wilde is unerringly focussed on her heroines, and on their fundamental right to get things wrong.

Why do people keep making films about writers?

No, what’s dismaying about All Is True is that it plays so slow and loose.

Historians of the period will learn nothing new from the movie, yet it remains a stirring enterprise, especially when it peers back, beyond the bright public record of Gorbachev’s heyday, into the mist of what feels like a distant past.

You could argue that such silly satisfaction comes with the territory, but although I enjoyed the snap of Long Shot, I couldn’t help remembering how “Roman Holiday” (1953) — another film about a lowly journalist who falls for a higher being — draws to its wrenching close.

Structurally, the film is all chop and change, with Hare and Fiennes tacking back and forth across Nureyev’s early years. Some viewers will find the result too fussy by half; I liked its restlessness, and the sense of a chafed and driven spirit that refuses to be boxed in.

The one thing you do need to know about Avengers: Endgame is that it runs for a little over three hours, and that you can easily duck out during the middle hour, do some shopping, and slip back into your seat for the climax. You won’t have missed a thing.

Garrone’s forte, as ever, is to layer the brutish with the beautiful, and to find grace in dereliction.

Budreau’s movie, entertaining as it is, leaves us little the wiser. Maybe it was a job for Bergman, after all.

The problem is, there’s only just enough story to go round. You can hear the creak as both characters and subplots get jacked up out of proportion.

Denis delves into the group psychology of a beleaguered crew, housed in an interplanetary rust bucket. Her devotees will claim, correctly, that her movie blooms with provocative ideas.

The best parts of the new film, by a long stretch, are the flying sequences, in which Dumbo wheels around inside the tent. Sometimes he even has a jockey, in the daring shape of Colette (Eva Green), the in-house trapeze artist. Elsewhere, however, we are dragged through patches of glum and listless drama.

In short, the pursuit of pleasure is not confined to our hero alone but extended to all comers, with a horny democratic good will, and it’s typical of Korine to suggest that, in an era as acrimonious as ours, the true provocation is to harbor no grudges, to forgive us our trespasses, and to drift along, catching the tide of contentment.

If Roll Red Roll feels raw and pressing, six and a half years after the event, that’s because it is set on one of the world’s most contested borders: the place where online justice meets, and chafes against, the due process of the law. Expect worse battles to come.

Us is political filmmaking of the most spirited sort, and it sets up quite a fight: the Hydes come to visit the Jekylls, and the Jekylls hit back. Whom you cheer for, in the long run, is up to you.

All that we treasure in Jia is there in Zhao’s scrutinizing gaze, at once pointed and guarded, and in the fierce patience with which she deliberates before taking action.

Is it any surprise that this disturbing brand of cinema was triggered by 9/11, a catastrophe that, despite the valor it called forth, and the wars that ensued, lies beyond redemption and revenge? Or that Hotel Mumbai, a well-staged model of the form, should leave you feeling fidgety and low? You can admire a film, reel at the horrors it unfolds, and still wind up asking yourself, helplessly, what it was all for.

On the other hand, we have Brie Larson, who is by far the best reason to see the movie. If we ignore “Elektra” (2005), which isn’t hard to do, this is the first film to be fronted by a woman in the male-infested galaxy of Marvel—quite a burden for Larson, who shoulders it with ease, executing her duties, not to mention her opponents, with resourcefulness and wit.

If you lack a taste for such hokum, Greta is still worth seeing, for the sake of Isabelle Huppert: an A-grade performer, by any standard, as shown in the rigors of “The Piano Teacher” (2001) and the vengeful perversity of “Elle” (2016).

The story of Gloria Bell, to be honest, is stretched a little thin. For the millionth time, the female of the species is let down by the male, and that’s that. The genius of Moore, though, is how plausibly, and how patiently, she fills the spaces of ordinary living.

Sitting through Transit is like watching an anti-“Casablanca,” so diligent is Petzold in the draining of romantic hopes, and there were times when I dreamed that Claude Rains would stroll in and order a champagne cocktail. What sustains this highly unusual film, and lends it an ominous momentum, is the figure of Rogowski, as Georg.

The Iron Orchard, though geographically confined, is all over the place. We flit past the patches of Jim’s life that matter (what happened during those two years, as the dollars poured in?) and linger on those that don’t. Random flashbacks alert us to his youth. The musical score is overcooked, the cast underpowered, and the dialogue something of a mishmash.

Viewers reared on The Lego Movie will find plenty to nourish them anew. The songs are still peppy. The principal voices are still supplied by Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, and Will Arnett. And real, non-animated kids are still shown, now and then, sporting with their Lego creations.

Yet the movie is not to be skipped. You should sample its mixture of bacchanal and gall, and revel in Farhadi’s dependable deftness, as he sketches and frames his collection of characters.

Stately rather than stealthy, is no match for it, but you are borne along, nonetheless, by the clash of characters, and by the ironies of historical momentum.

You find yourself gradually engulfed, as if by rising waters, and it seems only fair to report that The Wild Pear Tree lasts for more than three hours.

Whatever they pay these movie stars to keep a straight face, it’s not enough.

In short, it’s up to Curtis to rescue the film. She’s meant to be the villain, but her lines, even the motley ones (“The stars aligned, we slayed the dragon, and we won”), are delivered with such a delectable thwack that I kept forgetting to boo.

You have to admire Shyamalan’s efforts to deconstruct a genre that he evidently loves, yet there is just so little to haunt or to fool us in the result, and a few sharp laughs might have helped his cause.

It’s when Landais departs from the original, or has a bright idea for expanding on it, that the movie’s troubles begin.

If you’re slow, like me, and find yourself bemused by the chronology, don’t worry; your reward will be a topnotch twist toward the end. By rights, that should make you want to watch the movie all over again, in order to sort out what belongs where, except that everything about it is so scummy—even the sight of creamer being stirred into coffee makes you gag—that a second viewing would feel like the grimmest of grinds. Destroyer is a thriller, but only just.

The film depends, in other words, on its stars. Both, you can tell, have studied their respective masters with scrupulous care, and the results of their pupillage are plain to see.

In short, those of us who pursue Mariolatry — the worship of all things Poppins — are free to delight in this film. Indeed, it shifts a little nearer than its predecessor did to the spiky, peppery briskness of Travers’s tales, and the whole enterprise exhales, as it should, an air of the politely mad.

Roma is persuasive in its beauty. It wins you over. The face of Aparicio, in the leading role, is not placidly resigned but serene in its stoicism, and if she is less a participant than a bystander during the major convulsions of the era, well, few of us can claim to be much more.

This interfamily clash, fizzing with one-upmanship, is the highlight of the film, and that’s the problem. The planets of the plot, as it were, are more exciting than the sun around which they revolve.

Personally, I reckon that Portman tips Vox Lux off balance. The simple act of drinking through a straw is turned into an embarrassing megaslurp.

The secrets unveiled in the movie’s second half are mostly wretched, and Kore-eda, in his steady and unhectoring way, is levelling grave accusations at Japanese social norms, yet what stays with you, unforgettably, is that bundle of mixed souls at the start.

The good news about the new film from Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite, is that you are likely to emerge from it in good humor — bemused, or amused, or a mixture of the two.

It’s a mixed bunch, often flimsy, with deliberate lurches of tone, and the Coens, as ever, are unable (or unwilling) to decide whether barbarous bloodshed is something to be flinched from or cackled at. Yet I came away haunted by a scattering of sights and sounds.

Widows, in other words, is a merger — of silliness and perspicacity, of conspiratorial gloom and surprising violence. (Even those who wield it can be taken aback.) So strong is the cast that it carries us over the gaps in the movie’s logic.