Anthony Lane

If The Son lacks the grip of Zeller’s previous film, “The Father” (2020), it’s because the fable of Nicholas and Peter has the brittle feel of a setup.

Even if you grow impatient with White Noise—an intimate black comedy that dreams of becoming an epic—stick with it, for the sake of the end credits.

Frankly, who cares who assassinates whom?

The horror is genuinely visceral, yet the story, aided by impassioned work from Chalamet and Russell, pushes onward with a rough and desperate grace. Bones and All proves difficult to watch, but looking away is harder still.

The Fabelmans may look nice ’n’ easy as it swings along, with a pile of laughs to cushion the ride, and a nifty visual gag in the closing seconds, but take care. Here is a film that is touched with the madness of love.

Unlike the youthful romance in “Liberty Heights,” which bore the gleam of a better society, the alliance of Paul and Johnny looks doomed from the start, and the movie, gazing forward, sees no cause for harmony or hope.

Somehow, Wells retains control of her unstable material, and the result, though intimate, guards its secrets well.

What animates The Banshees of Inisherin and saves it from stiffness is the clout of the performances. Within the oxlike Colm, thanks to Gleeson, we glimpse a ruminative despair, and Farrell adds Pádraic to his gallery of heroes so hapless that they forfeit all claim to the heroic. The movie, however, belongs to Condon.

Amsterdam is, or is meant to be, a caper: an easygoing endeavor, you might think. But capering is as tricky on the silver screen as it is on the dance floor, and the tone of the tale keeps losing its footing.

Having been twisted into bewildered bits by the convolutions of Park’s narrative, I was astonished, toward the end, to find it brushing against the tragic.

The part of Lydia is scored for hero, villain, mother, dictator, and f*ckup, and Blanchett responds with perfect pitch.

Bedazzling, overlong, and unjust, “Blonde” does a grave disservice to the woman whom it purports to honor.

Don’t Worry Darling is about the development of regressive materials—about forcing women back into boxy lives and striving to convince them that they like it there. The problem is not that this is a cautionary tale but that the caution comes as no surprise.

The Good Boss pulls more weight than you’d expect, and Bardem is in charge of the pulling. Here is one of his most packed performances—often funny, yet never engineered for laughs alone, and persuasive in its portrait of an essentially weak soul who persists in dreaming of strength.

The movie, though a frantic treat for the retina, is also oddly inactive.

The suspense, to be honest, is pretty half-cocked, and made to seem more intense than it is by outbursts of dimly choreographed panic.

In truth, the only soul to emerge with any credit from “Bullet Train” is Brad Pitt, who drifts through the tumult in a haze of unbothered charm.

Like “Get Out” and “Us,” it is another resourceful meditation on fear and wonder—errant at times, yet strewn with frights and ever alert to the threat of racial hostility.

Presleyologists will learn nothing here, and purists will find plenty against which to rail. Less knowing viewers, however, may well be sucked in by Luhrmann’s lively telling of the tale. This is not a movie for suspicious minds.

The symptoms may be far from covid-like, and the mortality rate, as far as we can gather, is blessedly low, but what Nikou evokes, with a haunting prescience, is the air of a stunned world.

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

Miracle is busy on the eye. As in a documentary, we follow the characters around from one task, whether grim or menial, to the next. Stand back, however, and Apetri’s careful patterning can be discerned.

Sadly, the new film is glum, dishearteningly so, and its narrative pulse is weak.

There will be viewers, no doubt, who share the violent bleakness of the movie’s outlook. Will they admire such rigor, or will they reckon, as I did, that it narrows and flattens the free movement of the drama, with dismal results?

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.

Mystery buffs will see a twist coming from afar, and connoisseurs of horror will be underscared, yet the film sits squarely in the Ricci canon. Once again, she leaves us wondering: Is her character the victim of menace and disorientation, or could she herself be the wellspring of strangeness?

What stirred the fans around me, causing them to levitate in their seats, was not the film’s emotional sway (for it has none) but the miraculous visitation of characters from other Marvel flicks, many of them played by embarrassed-looking British actors, whose every entrance was met with ejaculations of joy.

Far more valuable is the urgency with which the movie stares ahead, as it were, at any future legislation that would incite women to take such dire measures once again.