Anthony Lane

So skilled are both Carell and Tatum that the movie itself falls prey to the characters’ repression. Though never less than careful and clever, it’s also a stunted and fiercely unhappy piece of work, straining hard to deliver home truths about a commonweal that has beaten itself out of shape.

You don't feel bamboozled, fooled, or patronized by District 9, as you did by most of the summer blockbusters. You feel winded, and shaken, and shamed. [September 14, 2009, pg.115]

And is Law the right fit for such a role? Whereas Hugh Grant, another fine young dandy of yore, has been rejuvenated by the creases of middle age, Law, I regret to say, looks glum and soured. The problem, for The Nest, is that the sourness is present from the start; he never gives off the bounce and the thrust that Rory is rumored to possess.

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.

Damon has never seemed more at home than he does here, millions of miles adrift.

What Rourke offers us, in short, is not just a comeback performance but something much rarer: a rounded, raddled portrait of a good man. Suddenly, there it is again--the charm, the anxious modesty, the never-distant hint of wrath, the teen-age smiles, and all the other virtues of a winner.

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.

It is not that Pattinson has ceased to make our hearts throb but that he has learned to claw at our nerves, too, and even to turn our stomachs, all without sinking his teeth into a single neck. The vampire is laid to rest.

Why put yourself through Passages, then, if it’s so painful a trip? Largely because of Rogowski. Tomas is a beast, and were he played by an actor of less vehemence he’d be a pain in the neck and nothing more. As it is, he pulls us into the jungle.

This is less of a courtroom drama, I reckon, and more of a discordant, highly strung character clash with legal bells and whistles tacked on.

Craig has the courage to present a hollow man, flooding the empty rooms where his better nature should be with brutality and threat. His smile is more frightening than his straight face, and he doesn’t bother with the throwaway quips that were meant to endear us to the other Bonds.

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.

You feel both moved and exhausted by the distance that Wilson has to travel, musically and emotionally, before reaching the shore. That makes it, I guess, a happy ending. But then, as one of the Beach Boys remarks, on listening to “Pet Sounds,” even the happy songs are sad.

Arnold’s very strength — the mashup of grime and epiphany — is in danger of becoming a shtick. Then, there’s the length: an elasticated plot doesn’t really suit a director who is at her best in specific locations, where people get stuck like flies.

Given this mockable array, Holofcener goes surprisingly easy on her troupe of fools. Could it be that, over the years, her approach to the hypersensitive has lost a pinch of sourness and grown more sympathetic?

The Meyerowitz Stories comes across as Baumbach’s ripest and wisest film to date, alert to the fact that so little in life, especially a screwy or a super-ambitious life, is open to resolution.

Some people make films in homage to Ingmar Bergman, others nod to the French New Wave, but only the Wilsons would think to follow in the footsteps of Burt Reynolds.

By temperament, Abrams is more of a Spielbergian than he is a Lucasite. His visual wit may not be, as it is for Spielberg, a near-magical reflex, but nor is Abrams suckered into bombast by technological zeal, as Lucas has been, and the new movie, as an act of pure storytelling, streams by with fluency and zip. To sum up: “Star Wars” was broke, and it did need fixing. And here is the answer.

Yet the great thing about White God is that the more you command it to sit and stay — to settle down as a plausible plot, or to cohere as a political fable — the more it slips its leash and runs amok.

Buscemi is the least grass-fed of actors, meant for the rat-run of city streets, and, if I didn’t quite believe in him as a country guy, I believed even less in Chloë Sevigny as a cynical jockey with a set of broken bones. But Plummer, who recently played the kidnapped John Paul Getty III, in “All the Money in the World,” grounds and tethers the movie, as an unclaimed soul with barely a dollar to his name.

Barbie is fun, no question, yet the fun is fragmented. You come away with a head full of bits: interruptions that are sprinkled over the plot like glitter.

The casting of Minority Report may be the smartest in the history of Spielberg. [1 July 2002, p. 96]

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

Still, however obvious the emotional setup, Heller, Hanks, and Rhys manage, Lord knows how, to skirt the pitfalls of mush, and to forge something unexpectedly strong.

As the film concludes with his upraised hand, conductor’s fingers unfurling against a blue sky, you do feel that you have witnessed a small victory of wisdom over indifference and ennui. When in doubt, strike up the band.

For all its oddities, this movie does carry weight, and, with more than eight per cent of Americans out of work, the timing of its release here could not be more acute.

In one respect, though not a major one, it is a masterpiece: seldom will you find a better class of fadeout.

The Old Man & the Gun is as much of a fantasy as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Yet you buy into the geniality of Lowery’s movie, nourished as it is by the entire cast.

In short, The Last of the Unjust is every bit as quarrelsome as it should be. Murmelstein, recounting the circumstances in which he took mortally serious decisions, dares to ask us if we could have done any better.

I prefer Wildlife when it gets messier, as Mulligan casts aside her natural sweetness to bring us a soured soul, driven only by the courage of her confusion. So rank is the unhappiness that you can almost smell the bitter smoke of the fires, drifting from far away.

Strangest of all, we go along with it in a sort of dream, scarcely pausing to complain, so expert is Mungiu at drawing us into the fold of these passionate souls. [8 March 2013, p.80]

The first half of Let Them All Talk is barely there as a movie. Soderbergh seems to be sketching out ideas for a plot, and gingerly feeling his way into its moral possibilities, as if he were clinging to a rail, beside a heaving sea. And yet the Atlantic stays calm.

Meirelles's picture is so keen to brandish its social wrath, and its spirits are so rampagingly high, that the bruises it inflicts barely last a night. [20 January 2003, p. 94]

The director is Debra Granik, who made “Winter’s Bone” (2010), in which Ron had a minor role; the melodramatic strain in that film was less convincing than its observational acuities, which return to the fore here. With no narrator, it is up to the camera to shepherd us through Ron’s days.

The movie’s most potent closeup is of a black policewoman, in a line confronting protesters; if you can film her, why not learn what she has to say? Folayan and Davis, however, hold no brief for even-handedness, and, for those who dominate the screen, any sign of temperance, even in a President, is treated with contempt.

With no narrator to shepherd us along, the movie feels noisy and restless. The period is revived by a wealth of songs on the soundtrack, and by the sleek and succulent Panther look.

It is the most oppressive of the great tragedies, and "Macbeth" aside, the leanest, and the task that Fiennes has set himself is to liberate it from the theatrical while preserving the dramatic bite. In that, he succeeds with brio. [23 Jan. 2012, p.86]

The movie that we do have is cogent, lavish, and formidable enough, with a Recchi-like power to frighten and seduce.

The glum fact is that Gone Girl lacks clout where it needs it most, at its core.

The quiet joke of the film is that you could scarcely meet two less revolutionary souls.

To be honest, del Toro has thrown too much into the mix. For no compelling reason, for instance, and to unresounding effect, the movie also happens to be a musical.

The charm -- the midsummer enchantment -- never feels forced; it steals up and wins you. A true romance.

Having delighted in the doominess of Drive, as its journey began, I ended much less joyful than repelled.

The Fighter, for all the dedication of its players, takes a heavy swing at us, and misses.

What Kore-eda doles out are not revelatory surprises so much as gradual enlightenments, and our attitude toward the characters is forbidden to settle or to stick.

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.

There is no narrator; rather, we are invited to eavesdrop on--or to get an earful from--such figures as Hassan Ibrahim, a jovial reporter with Al Jazeera, and Samir Khader, one of the network’s senior producers. [24 May 2004, p. 97]

Here is the territory that "Twilight" never dared to enter. It was so busy with crushes, covens, werewolves, and all the other moth-eaten trappings of the genre that it forgot to ask, Why do vampires not die of boredom? Is time not the sharpest stake in the heart? [14 April 2014, p.86]

What we glean from Belvaux’s trilogy is the reassurance (rare on film, with its terror of inattention) that people are both important and unimportant, and that heroes and leading ladies, in life as in art, can fade into extras before our eyes. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] [2 February 2004, p. 94]

What is missing from the film is wit—the deep wit that comes from playing off species and environments against each other.

Let the Sunshine In is said to be loosely based on Roland Barthes’s “A Lover’s Discourse” — very loosely, I would argue, in the same way that “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was based on a branch of Home Depot. As for Claire Denis, anybody new to her methods will be addled by her breaking and stretching of the rules.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film. Yet the play of emotions on Macdonald’s face tells of worries and wounds much deeper than anything that can be accounted for in the script, and it will take more than a jigsaw, I reckon, even a thousand-piece whopper, to free this woman’s soul.

The fact that Mother keeps its balance is a tribute to the leading actress.

All in all, however, this is one of the director’s most absorbing works. It soaks you up, and its melancholy (a shot of Martin, say, eating cereal on his own, in the semi-dark) is somehow less disturbing than its sprees.

Makes a suitable staging post in Witherspoon's headlong career. She may want to forget it by Christmas, yet its cushioned slackness allows her to sharpen her grasp of a steely American type: the girl next door who will kill to get out of town. [30 Sept 2002, p. 145]

In short, Official Competition is nicely balanced, and the poiser-in-chief is Cruz, whose portrayal of Lola goes way beyond simple wackiness.

To point out that Priscilla is superficial, even more so than Coppola’s other films, is no derogation, because surfaces are her subject. She examines the skin of the observable world without presuming to seek the flesh beneath, and this latest work is an agglomeration of things—purchases, ornaments, and textures.

If The Painter and the Thief is occasionally annoying, it’s because Ree gives away so little. He tracks to and fro in time, springing items of evidence upon us without warning, and withholding others.

There is no whodunit here — the horror is plain in the opening shots — and the how is presented with great restraint, but the why remains veiled and mysterious long after the film has ended.

The sense of period, of ungainly English pride, is funny and acute, but the movie mislays its sense of wit as the girls grow up.

Schamus is a great producer of independent cinema, having overseen — and sometimes co-written — the work of Ang Lee, but this is the first movie he has directed, and the rhythm of the storytelling feels careful and courteous to a fault.

The whole enterprise is designed to skirt the traditional traps of the music movie; instead of a laborious bio-pic, we get a sly, quick-witted meditation on a character always likely to elude our grasp.

It’s a hell of a performance from Küppenheim as the heroine, precisely because she demonstrates how hard it is to be heroic.

Victor Hugo would watch this film and weep.

In Insomnia, the crunch comes as the hero and his opposite number hook up on a ferry, to discuss what each of them knows about the other. This should be Nolan's big moment, his answer to that quiet, magnificent interlude in Michael Mann's "Heat," when Pacino met De Niro in a coffee shop. -- But Williams and Pacino just don't mesh. [27 May 2002, p.124]

What’s unusual about Kajillionaire, and what makes it July’s most absorbing film to date, is that you can feel her testing and challenging her own aptitude for whimsy.

Those who worship Joy Division may bridle at Corbijn’s film for its reluctance to mythologize their hero. Speaking as someone so irretrievably square that I not only never listened to the band but didn’t even know anyone who liked it, I can’t imagine a tribute more fitting than this.

The plain fact is that Top Gun: Maverick works. Designed to coax a throng of viewers into a collective and involuntary fist pump, it far outflies the original, while retaining one old-fashioned virtue: the lofty action unfolds against real skies, rather than giant smears of C.G.I. The heroes may do super stuff, but they’re not superheroes.

Everything ends badly, or sadly, and one can imagine the film being screened for M.B.A. students as a cautionary tale—frequently very funny, but often disheartening, too.

This is not just pliable filmmaking; it is an exercise in worldliness, in a feel for the cracks and warps of circumstance, which is all the more startling when you learn that the director is thirty-one.

What we have here is a fouled-up fairy tale of oppression and empowerment, and it’s hard not to be ensnared by its mixture of rank maleficence and easy reverie. The gap between being genuinely stirred and having your arm twisted, however, is narrower than we care to admit.

You may start to wish you’d gone to see the new “Jackass” movie instead.

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.

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

So what kind of movie is this? A conservative one, I would say, not in politics (a topic that never arises at the table) but in its devotion to long-ripened skills and to the sheer hard work that goes into the giving of pleasure.

What’s discomforting about The Card Counter is that Schrader builds this strong moral backdrop for his characters and then allows them to drift about in front of it.

The emotional wallop grows more zealous with almost every sequence, and Loach’s refusal to go easy on us is as stubborn as it was when he made “Cathy Come Home.”

Christopher Nolan, for all his visionary flair, wants to suck the comic out of comic books; Anne Hathaway wants to put it back in. Take your pick.

Gray is hampered, to an extent, by treading in the tracks of Werner Herzog, who went to South America with Klaus Kinski, his leading man (or, as Herzog calls him, “my best fiend”), and returned with the extraordinary “Aguirre, Wrath of God” (1972) and “Fitzcarraldo” (1982).

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.

In the end, Ex Machina lives and dies by Alicia Vikander. The film clicks on when she first appears, and it dims every time she goes away.

Oldboy has the fatal air of wanting so desperately to be a cult movie that it forgets to present itself as a coherent one.

What fleshes out the movie, and lends it such an extraordinary pulse of life, is the want of words.

There's another reason for the lure of The Sisters Brothers. If the lives that it portrays are in transit, the world that encircles them is in even faster flux.

We get one lovely, cheering sequence of a trashed room putting itself in order, like the untidy nursery in "Mary Poppins," but the rest of the magic here feels randomly grabbed at.

Zootopia, like its heroine, is zesty, bright, and breakneck, with chase scenes and well-tuned gags where you half expect songs to be.

Never, though, has the evolution of an automaton been depicted with the extensive grace and wit that Dan Stevens, speaking good German with a slight British accent, brings to I’m Your Man.

The result is clean, delirious, and, yes, speedy—the best big-vehicle-in-peril movie since Clouzot's "The Wages of Fear."

Still, there is a time to stop quibbling, and to laud the fact that this movie was made at all. [24 June 2013, p.85]

I am casting no aspersions on the director when I say that The Saddest Music in the World is a work of manic depression. The mania is there in the frenzied editing, the inability to concentrate on a detail for more than a few seconds; and the depression is there in the forcible lowering of spirits. [10 May 2004, p. 107]

In truth, Mr. Holmes is not Holmesian at all. It is Jamesian, as shown by a wonderful encounter between Kelmot and Holmes — an attraction of opposites, you might say — on a garden bench.

Never quite shrugs off its literary manners. [18 & 25 Feb 2002, p. 200]

Road to Nowhere is a dead end. Most of the performances are carved from balsa wood. [13 & 20 June 2011, p. 129]

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.

As for the title, well, it made me think of Thomas Carlyle's wife, who read Browning's long poem "Sordello," enjoyed it, but still couldn't work out whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book. So it is with 2046. A place? A date? A hotel room? A bar tab? You tell me.

To be fair, A Quiet Passion is wittier, in its early stretches, than anyone might have foreseen, but it’s when the door closes, and the Dickinsons are alone with their trepidations, that the movie draws near to its rightful severity.

The funniest thing about The Women is that Mick Jagger is one of the producers.

To a remarkable extent, the new movie is full of cheer. It feels boisterous, bustling, and, at times, perilously close to a romp.