Anthony Lane

Azor is Fontana’s first feature, and what’s impressive is how coolly he avoids the temptation to put on a big show, preferring more delicate tactics.

Searching for Mr. Rugoff is an entertaining and instructive jaunt, and it bristles with small shocks.

Levy, holding his nerve, does cut through the chaos, delivering a fable that, if not exactly coherent, is nonetheless tinged with the very last virtue that you’d expect in a movie of this ilk. It has charm.

Annette is a folie de grandeur, alas, without the grandeur.

Sisto picks up the spell that is cast by Lowery’s tale, verdant with danger, and continues to weave.

The Green Knight wields a peculiar magic, the reason being that Lowery—as he showed in A Ghost Story (2017), which ranged with ease over centuries—is consumed by cinema’s capacity to measure and manipulate time.

Tense and firm at either end, it sags in the middle like a mattress. Also, the grownups are pretty dull and flat, their mood set to maximum glower; luckily, we have Remmy—played first by Brooklynn Prince and later, as a teen-ager, by Nell Tiger Free—to steer us through the doldrums and to energize the plot.

The acting is of a soaring ineptitude; the deeper Diesel emotes, the more he resembles a man who dabbed too much wasabi on his tuna roll.

Summer of Soul is one of those rare films from which you emerge saying, “My favorite part was that bit. No, that bit. Wait, how about that bit?”

This is classic Petzold territory, where you can dwell in a place, or a relationship, without ever quite belonging there.

To dramatize such binding ideals, for almost two and a half hours, and to conjure precipitous revels from next to nothing, as Miranda and Chu have done, is no small feat.

Whereas Cruella sent me back to Dodie Smith, as a blessed escape from what Disney has done to her creations, Tove dispatched me down a rabbit hole, or through a Moomin door. I recommend the trip.

Emotions are not toyed with glancingly but stretched out and blazoned forth, and the result is that the new film is nearly an hour longer than the original cartoon.

The plot of The Dry, it has to be said, is not a model of elegance and plausibility. I sniffed out the villain, who barely merits the description, a fair way off, and the dénouement, though it involves the threat of fire-starting, is the dampest of squibs. Yet the film has serious staying power.

You could argue that a little of this goes a long way, but that’s the point. An Andersson movie is a gallery of littles, each of them going a very long way.

Eventually, despite a number of Dionysian interludes, not least a drug-driven scooter ride with neither helmets nor clothes, this on-off emotional rhythm grows demoralizing, and the movie becomes a less than appealing blend of rave and rut.

Most of Burger’s film, in truth, is either numb or dumb.

One mark of the Godzilla franchise is the ingenuity with which each director manages to waste the talents of an excellent cast.

Yet the movie, less stirring than it ought to be, is peculiarly cramped, lacking the emotional latitude of Bridge of Spies. Spielberg dramatized a clash of moral principles, under the cover story of a thriller, but The Courier is all that it appears to be and not much more.

Let’s be honest: the mainspring of The Father, onscreen, is the presence of Hopkins—an actor at the frightening summit of his powers, portraying a man brought pitifully low. The irony is too rare to resist.

What sets this film apart is its fusing of the impassioned and the grimly palpable.

It bears renewed witness to King’s eloquence, which is no less astounding in casual exchanges than on grand occasions.

The revelation here is Chevallier—or, to quote the end credits, “Martine Chevallier of the Comédie Française”—as Mado. Watch her watching the people around her, after the languid strength of her body has failed. Some of them discuss her as if she were absent, or dead, but her sharp blue eyes, following the action, and almost filling the movie screen, show that her wits are intact. So is her force of will. She’s all there.

Credit is due to Dick Pope, the cinematographer, who toughens the film and somehow prevents the fabled grandeur of the locations from softening into the pretty.

It’s fun to see Washington square off against a brace of performers who could not resemble him less in bearing and tone.

Conversation is pause-heavy; smiles are fleeting and tight with anxiety; the plot is a knot.

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.

Nomadland is not primarily a protest. Rather, it maintains a fierce sadness, like the look in its heroine’s eyes, alive to all that’s dying in the West.