Bilge Ebiri

The Stranger, it turns out, is a story for our times, which makes this lovely new version doubly welcome.

The surprises are mostly in the details. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is bursting with ideas that feel like clever marginalia on an otherwise familiar setup.

What distinguishes Two Prosecutors is not its overall narrative trajectory (which reads more like a bitter cosmic joke than anything else) but rather how Loznitsa subtly colors in Kornyev’s journey through the halls of power.

Shot in black and white and filled with images of collapse, Below the Clouds is nevertheless a strangely hopeful work.

Hoppers is a fun, modest little movie with enough zip and charm to keep kids engaged, and as such, one doesn’t want to criticize it too much. But the memory of what Pixar once was, the behemoth that redefined animation for multiple generations, may still make us wonder where all that energy and originality and artistry went.

The film Segan has made is very much its own thing. It’s a twilight fable of a city that’s changing, whose spirit remains distinct and grand and full of mystery, much like the remarkable actor at its center.

While The Ballad of Judas Priest may not always feel complete, by centering the music, it excites our curiosity long after the credits roll.

Not an image is wasted. Not a single line of dialogue feels unnecessary, or a subplot tangential.

Zi is fascinating, at times even rapturous.

It’ll probably drive some people crazy, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Through heightened control of imagery and mood, attention to composition and texture and sound, Manuel turns this simple, languid setting into something far more sinister without ever betraying the beauty of what’s onscreen.

Knife deserves credit for more than just its compelling depiction of a horrific recent event. It artfully interweaves multiple threads from Rushdie’s life and career. The film works as a biography as well as an important history lesson.

McKinley establishes just the right amount of physical and emotional stakes, and a cast led by Ethan Hawke infuses the drama with believable camaraderie, conflict, and tension. It’s the kind of atmospheric, exciting period drama we don’t really get much anymore.

For a movie so filled with death, The Oldest Person in the World is surprisingly, almost confrontationally life-affirming. That sounds cheap, but Green comes by the sentiment honestly.

[A] truly monumental work of art ... The footage has been edited with fluidity and grace.

Azzam and MacInnes give us a modern-day epic that traverses borders — truly, they’ve captured some incredible footage — but they outdo themselves by following that up with an absorbing, complex tale about the challenges of assimilation.

The peculiar charm of Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story ... lies in the way it’s driven by genuine curiosity about its subject. ... Watching Paralyzed by Hope, we start to understand why other comedians, including Apatow himself, would be so fascinated and electrified by Bamford’s work.

Like most art world satires (a generally cursed subgenre), The Gallerist doesn’t ultimately have all that much to say about the art world that hasn’t been said a million times before. But it’s also a blast, thanks to its energetically mannered performances and director Cathy Yan’s snappy pacing and flair for visual humor.

We talk of fictional movies with documentary touches, but Union County sometimes feels like a documentary with some fictional touches.

Josephine might not tell a particularly original story, but it tells it in a way that makes us see the world anew.

This could all easily get tiresome quite quickly, but the director has a light touch thanks to his poppy, direct style — colorful close-ups, broad line deliveries, simple cuts.

The beauty of DaCosta’s film is that these particular ideas are worked in subtly, even though The Bone Temple itself is not what one might call subtle. In fact, it’s downright looney tunes.

Despite Chalamet’s blazing brilliance, we don’t particularly root for Marty, or feel for him, or even hate him; he feels like a plot device in his own story. And yet there’s something there. Maybe the fact that this tale of constant forward motion has little room for humanity or reflection or reason says something about Marty and his times — which of course are ultimately our own.

Fire and Ash is in some ways the messiest of the three Avatar movies, but it’s also the richest, the one in which we most lose ourselves, the one that makes us wonder about these characters and constantly peer into those rapturous backgrounds, trying to see forever.

The tonal mismatch I feared could have turned one giant movie into a bit of a slog turns out to be among its greatest strengths. The reflective second half recontextualizes the first, and the progression of colorful action fantasia to quiet existential reckoning is overwhelming.

Wicked: For Good is shorter than the first film and, while it might be a step back in terms of spectacle, it’s a leap forward in (go ahead, laugh) subtlety and emotion. My audience was audibly sobbing by the end.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a film born of helplessness, about helplessness, and it embodies helplessness through its very form.

Predator: Badlands is a charming surprise. He may surprise us yet again.

At its best, the film gives us a sincere look at the creative process and reveals it to be a sad, scary, at times uncontrollable and destructive thing. Just for that alone, it’s worth seeing.

It Was Just an Accident plays like an ideal melding of the filmmaker Panahi was and the filmmaker he’s been forced to become. It’s an endlessly fascinating and extraordinarily powerful work.

You might go nuts trying to figure out exactly how anything works in this movie. But in the right hands, this can be a strength too. It certainly enhances the overall sense of dread, since we’re now in a world whose rules haven’t been clearly defined.

The picture thus combines the excitement of an old-school disaster spectacle with a fly-on-the-wall portrait of institutions struggling to function in the face of a calamity. The effect is singular: We enjoy the thrill ride immensely, but it’s the realism that sticks with us. Movies end, but the fires are here to stay.

It’s light on its feet but gradually gathers real emotional weight. It’s also beautifully shot and steeped in atmosphere. We walk away from it feeling like we’ve actually been somewhere and felt something.

Ultimately, the director leaves us with more questions than answers. Which is probably what art should always strive to do.

It has plenty of gritty ’70s atmosphere (facial hair! Radio DJs!) and feels grounded in its time and place, but it also has a purposeful whiff of timeliness that tells us it’s as much about today as it is about 1977.

Aware of the raw, incendiary power of her subject matter, Ben Hania doesn’t sensationalize this story, keeping the action fixed entirely in the call center itself, with actors portraying the dispatchers on the line.

The director’s latest, her first film in seven years, is an absurdly riveting thriller with the kind of ticking-clock, military-grade suspense the director does so well.

I found its thundering journey through several decades of recent Russian and world history revealing and (perhaps more importantly) enormously entertaining. And by utilizing Law’s charisma to approximate Putin’s anti-charisma, it gives us a villain who is chilling and believable. I can’t wait to see it again.

Sports biopics are so common that one couldn’t blame Safdie for trying to avoid conventionality, but sometimes the conventions are there for a good reason. In the end, though, he understands that his greatest weapon here is his star. A weapon, and a gift: It’s nice to have the Rock acting again.

The premise of Late Fame is so captivating that one wants to forgive its shortcomings and focus on what it does so well, starting with a truly great and nuanced role for Dafoe, whose physical presence can evoke coarse sturdiness and emotional delicacy at the same time.

Park’s ability to manipulate his imagery is something else entirely. His dissolves and overlays and intercutting are formal and sensual expressions of his great subject: that all of us are trapped in the same socio-economic and psychological nightmare.

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother finds the director in a minor key, which is sometimes his best key.

Del Toro’s comes into a marketplace more open to gothic delirium, and he’s such an expert craftsman that the film is a momentous technical achievement. But it’s more than that. Whatever its flaws, the director has filled Frankenstein with seemingly everything he loves, and it reflects his obsessions. It feels like the work of a true madman, and that’s really the only way anyone should make a movie of Frankenstein.

Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years.

The unknowability of life is beautiful, but so too is our desire to know. To be human, La Grazia seems to say, is to fight and lose against uncertainty, and then to fight and lose some more.

The movie has absorbed its actor’s vibe. It looks great, and it ambles along pleasantly, rarely veering too far into the dramatic or the emotional; moments of tension or insight are often defused with a laugh or some other odd narrative distraction. But by the end, it gets you anyway.

By the time Bugonia is over, with a series of beautiful and haunting images that seem to come out of nowhere, we understand that beneath its bemused dispassion lies a deep longing for connection.

Like the man who made it, Megalopolis is a movie that bears both the qualities and the scars of these conflicts. We probably didn’t need Megadoc to tell us this, but it remains a thoroughly fascinating look at one of the most unlikely films ever made.

The main danger with these types of movies is that all the fighting and shooting and snapping and stabbing and exploding will feel predictable or anonymous in a universe where action movies have become mere background noise. Tjahjanto infuses just enough creativity in his set pieces to keep us watching.

Is Weapons scary? It certainly has its moments, and the oblique structure enhances the gathering dread. But more than anything, it’s a twisty-turny hoot.

It showcases two astonishing performances: one from the always reliable Taron Egerton as the hardened, haunted ex-con Nate McClusky and another from newcomer Ana Sophia Heger as his young daughter, Polly, in whose queasy glances the drama finds its sorrow and its depth.

Here comes The Naked Gun, unabashedly crude and stupid and brilliant and weird and obvious and current and archaic and, finally, fall-out-of-your-seat-and-roll-on-the-floor hilarious. See it with the biggest audience you can find. It might just heal you. It might just heal the world.

Kurosawa films psychological torment with real gravity, and he films physical cruelty with humorous detachment. The absurdity of his vision matches our topsy-turvy reality.

It’s rich and dense, but it’s also propelled along by current events, accelerating as things reach their fearsome climax with the assault on Brasília — on those very federal buildings that 60-plus years ago held such promise. The terror and the tragedy on display are matched by the beauty of Costa’s filmmaking.

Rithy’s aim goes beyond a history lesson, however. This film is about something more alive, more present tense.

All in all, this live-action adaptation works remarkably well — a rare feat.

The film’s driving ideas, which transform over the course of the picture, are replete with ironic potential, but Flanagan ably navigates the tonal minefield, never presenting the whole thing as a wink-wink joke on his characters. They feel real, both in their conception and in how they deviate from our preconceptions, which is quite an accomplishment given that most of them aren’t even onscreen for that long within the movie’s frescolike structure.

Agathe is concave in both posture and spirit, but she feels right for this muted world of amorous contemplation, of long, uncertain glances met by equally long, equally uncertain glances. By the end, romance in the abstract becomes something much more real — and we can’t help but fall for all these characters ourselves.

Karan Kandhari’s colorful and deeply odd Sister Midnight, about the frustrations of a young woman in a working-class corner of Mumbai, is one of those movies that starts over here and ends waaay over there. But the film comes by its tonal shifts and narrative changes honestly — its twists are organic and rooted in character — which is quite an accomplishment for a feature directing debut

If we judge these films primarily by the creativity and elaborate absurdity of their death scenes, this latest entry ably expands the palette without messing with the formula.

The good news is that Final Reckoning does eventually recover from the calamity of its first hour to give us an entertaining, if still messy, Mission: Impossible movie.

One to One: John & Yoko becomes not just an enormously moving historical portrait but a freshly relevant and cathartic one.

It feels like a small miracle that the resulting film is so funny, lively, and light on its feet.

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia is an existential drama masquerading as a comedy masquerading as a thriller.

The villains in this movie aren’t merely cruel and sadistic; they’re also profoundly stupid and incompetent, which actually feels closer to the way things tend to be in the real world.

These are the intriguing ideas at work in Secret Mall Apartment, but the film works as a movie thanks to the sly way it’s been put together.

Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen take this dumb-clever, fake-movie-science idea and run with it as hard and as fast as they can in one straight direction, using Nate’s condition as an excuse for pure, unchecked mayhem.

Clocking in at 155 minutes, Who by Fire is not short. But it captures the imprecise language and ungainly rhythms of reality so well that you lose sense of time.

The jokes might not be the funniest, the bits might not be the wittiest, but it’s all done with such verve and velocity that we might not notice.

Slowly but surely, you settle into its gentle rhythms, and before you know it, it feels like an entire lifetime has passed by.

What’s truly striking about the film is the storybook quality that Anderson has given every single scene.

It feels like a great throwback thriller, one of those movies viewers will still be discovering years from now. Try to see it on a big screen while you can.

Our protagonist comes to feel like an avatar of the very ideas of youth and possibility, which also makes her an avatar of the opposite of those things — the idea that life eventually passes us all by. In creating a film about one beautiful person, Sorrentino reminds us that, in our memories, we were all beautiful once.

In telling the seemingly unremarkable life story of one ordinary man, Clint Bentley’s trancelike film, based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed 2012 novella, ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly.

It’s absorbing, suspenseful, and deeply moving — a case study in how to make an effective psychological thriller.

The true revelation lies in the whole, in the gathering sense that life is full of change and that nothing ever really resolves itself. That might also be why this particular anthology works so well, and also why it lingers afterwards.

The colorful, almost exuberant surfaces of Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game mask a grim, dystopian reality.

Even though we can foretell just about everything that will happen in The Wedding Banquet — every plot twist, every screwball complication — we don’t much mind, because the comedy is so brisk and good-natured.

All That’s Left of You isn’t really looking for empathy. Rather, in its own uneven but artful way, it shows us the alienation that survival sometimes requires. By the end, I was destroyed.

We’re watching a mundane spectacle of a mundane spectacle — a man in a room relating the mostly forgettable events of the previous day — but somehow, we’re also witnessing the arc of time within this quiet hour. So, no, the film is maybe not a doodle. There’s too much craft, too much care here for that. But it is a masterpiece.

A work of criticism as well as a work of art, it’s a sharp takedown of our culture’s obsession with true crime, identifying and skewering the genre’s most familiar tropes even as it playfully indulges in them.

We know, of course, that none of this will end well, and Blichfeldt gives us every gnarly, disgusting consequence in agonizing detail, be it vomit, blood, severed body parts, or some combination thereof. Nevertheless, the film is beautiful in its own way, like a Scandinavian fairy-tale riff on Italian giallo, narratively disquieting but cinematically exhilarating.

You walk out of Sly Lives! feeling like you’ve genuinely learned something, but you also walk out exhilarated.

Before our eyes, Every Little Thing comes to embody the fragile yet uncontainable mystery of all life.

Watching Big Nick get a little lost in a boozy dream of abandon, an ocean away from his troubles, we understand him better than we understand most of today’s movie heroes.

There’s an interesting juxtaposition here: a paint-by-numbers biopic structure, neatly bookmarked (to a fault) with pat dialogue about the perils of fame and the double life of stardom and abandonment issues and whatnot, which is then constantly upended by completely batshit musical sequences.

The Sonic movies have built their success on mixing light doses of Gen-X nostalgia with shiny, sparkly, speedy CGI action, and this new entry has that in spades. But for all their swiftness, the fights and chases in these pictures tend to have a predetermined quality; it can sometimes feel like watching someone else play a video game. That’s why giving the characters some shading helps.

For much of their 178-minute running time, Delaporte and de La Patellière let us delight in the spectacle of Dantès and his associates weaving their sinister, at times mysterious web — well-positioning us for the eventual reckoning, when we’ll be thoroughly invested in all these characters and their impending fates.

Tight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 presents an unexpected angle on a familiar event.

Law and Hoult’s differing energies turn the film into something more than a mere crime drama; it begins to feel like an eternal struggle with existential, civilizational consequences. This is an unforgettable movie.

Through her mesmerizing filmmaking, Kapadia creates a world that didn’t seem possible — which, of course, reinforces how imaginary this new place might prove to be. The film may end on notes of joy, but what lingers is more sadness.

Grant’s turn in Heretic is not just a great role that commands attention, it’s also a part that requires a dash of that Hugh Grant charm to pull off.

Cutler’s onscreen interactions with Stewart, as well as occasional forays into the way she treats the people around her, turn the picture into something a lot slippier and the subject into someone more captivating.

Eastwood’s unhurried gaze allows the characters’ humanity to shine through. His style might be simpler, but his generosity as a filmmaker, his willingness to embrace the complex and the open-ended, has never been more evident. Juror No. 2 is a fine entry in a great director’s career.

This picture about people obsessed with criminals and their grisly crimes confronts us with the mystery of who the obsessives truly are; the questions we ask of Kelly-Anne could also be asked of all us genre fiends. The expressionless, fascinated gaze at the heart of this film is ultimately not the protagonist’s, but our own.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of No Other Land lies in the way it compresses time.

The film returns us to a childlike gaze, marveling at a world alive with possibility, where every sight lives on a continuum of meaning.

Delectably ambiguous, the film always feels on the verge of some thematic breakthrough — a crystallized metaphor, a revealing flashback, a tell-tale fictional projection — but it admirably never gets there.