Anthony Lane

It is worth seeing Happy End for the long scene between him (Trintignant) and the remarkable Fantine Harduin — between the pitiless patriarch and his granddaughter. Together, they compare notes on the harm that they have done. From generation to generation, the blood runs cold.

As for Paul, you can’t help feeling that, ground down as he was, he didn’t need to get shrunk in the first place. He needed a shrink.

His thoughts look more dramatic than other actors’ deeds, and his deeds are done with a deliberated grace. If it is true, as Day-Lewis has declared, that Phantom Thread will be his final movie, we will miss him when he retires from the game that he has crowned. He is the Federer of film.

Nothing is more promisingly solid, to the moviegoer, than a major Spielberg production. You can foretell everything from the calibration of the craftsmanship to the heft of the cast, and The Post inarguably delivers.

The strangest thing about The Shape of Water, which should be one almighty mess, is that it succeeds. The streams of story converge, and, as in any good fairy tale, that which is deemed ugly and unworthy, by a myopic world, is revealed to be a pearl beyond price.

Chalamet is quite something, but Hammer is a match for him, as he needs to be, if the characters’ passions are to be believed.

Above all, the movie relies and thrives on Harboe, who is scrutinized, in closeup, with a vigilance that even Bergman might applaud, and who has the blessed knack of seeming like a perfectly capable adult in one sequence and then, in the next, like a vulnerable child.

Contriving somehow both to dawdle and to rush, Murder on the Orient Express” is handsome, undemanding, and almost wholly bereft of purpose.

Not since "Fargo" (1996) has [McDormand] found a character of such fibre. She doesn't pitch it to us, still less try to make it palatable; she seems to state Mildred, presenting her as a given fact, like someone unrolling a map.

Cranston, in Last Flag Flying, seeks out the same terrain, but his crudeness is more of a crotchety act, and the journey concludes on a glum conservative note. Some stories need not be told again. ♦

So repelled is Clooney by the response of white suburbia to African-Americans, and so keen is he to insure that we share his outrage at what they endured, that he quite forgets to be interested in them.

The best reason to see The Square is the remarkable Terry Notary, last seen in “War for the Planet of the Apes.” Here he plays a performance artist named Oleg, who brings simian havoc, way beyond his brief, to a glamorous event, roaring and thumping among the tuxedos and the gowns. If only he had done the same at Cannes.

If “The Lobster” remains Lanthimos’s most vital work, that’s because it tempers the gloom with a mischievous play of wit. The Killing of a Sacred Deer, by contrast, is stubbornly hard to enjoy; there are jokes, but they make few dents in the programmatic rigor of the plot.

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.

The result is itself a kind of diorama: exquisitely detailed, assembled with infinite care, but lacking the breath of life.

Despite all the overlaps, this is not a simulacrum of a Ridley Scott film. It is unmistakably a Denis Villeneuve film, inviting us to tumble, tense with anticipation, into his doomy clutches.

As actors of undiminished allure, they deserve the best, and Our Souls at Night left me with an austere fantasy. If only Michael Haneke, say, had got hold of the screenplay; if only he had shorn it of its folksiness, its relaxing guitar score, and its subplot about Addie’s grumpy grandson (Iain Armitage), whom Louis persuades to lay down his iPhone in favor of toy trains and fishing.

Baker has taken an unregarded thread of American life, from the fraying edge of the land, and spun something rousing, raucous, and sad. Innocence is not utterly lost, but its bright-purple shine has gone. Who knows what Moonee knew?

The film’s attempt to portray the Queen as more politically enlightened than her courtiers is kindly but unconvincing, and many of the actors bark and behave as if participating in a spoof.

Above all, there is Tom Cruise, whose career was in the ascendant, with “Risky Business” (1983) and “Legend” (1985), in the frantic years covered by the second half of American Made. Because he has changed so little in the interim, and mounted so uncanny a resistance to the onslaught of time, we feel, with a jolt, that we are gazing up at a star as he both was and still is. Astronomers may flee the cinema in confusion.

The showdown in Houston, for instance, comes across as tacky rather than triumphant, its sexual politics smothered in salesmanship, and redeemed only by the ferocity of Stone’s demeanor as she puts away yet another smash.

Yet the movie’s grasp of experience feels tenuous, trippy, and, dare one say, adolescent; if you gave an extremely bright fifteen-year-old a bag of unfamiliar herbs to smoke, and forty million dollars or so to play with, Mother! would be the result.

Graceful and all-embracing.

It feels at once crammed and sketchy, riddled with flashbacks and framing devices, and woefully light on frights.

You think afresh of the film’s title and wonder, Who is more unknown here, the nameless victim or the inscrutable doctor?

Near the end, we get to hear John Barry’s “The Persuaders” — not only one of the catchiest TV themes ever composed, redolent of moneyed innocence, but a key to the tactics of this movie. It is at once damnable and debonair. It seduces as it repels.

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.

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.