Bilge Ebiri

Rush satisfies our lust for both grand character combat and deadly gearhead spectacle.

In most good rom-coms you fall in love with the characters; in The Half of It you fall in love with their sheer longing.

By letting the picture embody his failures — by turning Armageddon Time into a self-aware look at his own limitations — the director makes that necessary connection between then and now, between the characters onscreen and us watching. In other words, he denies us the one thing these types of movies almost always provide: reassurance.

Yes, Thelma is a horror movie — a lovely, transfixing one — but don’t look to it for cheap scares. The terror here cuts far deeper.

In restoring Cousteau’s human side, Becoming Cousteau shows us both his brilliance and his shortcomings, and it suggests that these extremes were fundamentally connected. He was soft-spoken and modest on the surface yet consumed by an ambition that was driven as much by his remorse as by his vision.

The whole film feels a bit too careful: composed but also more than a little academic.

Ultimately, this is a tale of a mother and daughter trapped in a cycle of yearning and despair. It’s a lovely, deeply affecting film.

Val is not a gloomy movie at all. Quite the opposite. It’s vibrant, quick, and alive, and Val Kilmer today makes for an entertaining guide, with his hammy facial gestures now doing double duty since he can’t talk.

The film is called Dear White People, but it might as well be called Dear Everybody. It’s hilarious, and just about everyone will wince with recognition at some point in the film.

What makes it work is the solemn efficiency of director David Oelhoffen’s storytelling and the quiet intensity of the two leads.

Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario starts off with a rich, surreal premise, and for much of its running time, it mixes playful, cringe-comic energy with an undercurrent of existential anxiety. But it eventually manages to undo much of what made it so tantalizing by turning metaphor and subtext into a more narrow-minded satire.

Therein lies part of the dissonance with this often-wonderful, deceptively strange movie. You could get emotional whiplash watching it.

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 film’s most powerful achievement is perhaps also its most basic: the simple sight of two friends talking, openly and gently, about all the things on their minds.

Don’t expect incendiary topicality from The Golden Dream; this is more poetry than politics.

It’s a movie that sings, poignantly, from many times at once.

It’s a testament to the strength of Thompson’s performance, and DaCosta’s control of tone and action, that for all the bleakness of this world, we keep watching. The result is a work that lingers, grimly, in the mind.

In its own weird little way, Thor: Ragnarok manages to poke fun at the constant churn of myth and entertainment of which the movie itself is a part. It’s a candy-colored cage of delights, but it is a cage nevertheless — and it doesn’t hide that fact.

There’s a lot of great filmmaking in Novitiate, but there’s also quite a bit still missing.

For all of (T)error’s topicality and its thriller-like qualities, what makes the film is Sutcliffe and Cabral’s compact, complex portrait of Saeed — paranoid, chatty, mired in self-loathing, but also oddly reflective.

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.

Perhaps if Kubrick himself wasn’t obsessed, if his films weren’t so thoroughly overwhelming in real life, then they wouldn’t have exploded in our minds the way they did. Filmworker is both a cautionary tale and a tribute to this kind of compulsion.

Nair's immersive, energetic style, combined with her talented cast's ability to invest even the most obvious lines with genuine feeling, gives Queen of Katwe a powerful clarity.

Its story may be thin, its characters not particularly original, but McKenzie’s use of cinematic language is savvy and novel, finding complexity where others might find only emptiness.

There are many elements that make The Fall Guy enormous fun, but what makes it genuinely artful is the way that Leitch and his team (including writer Drew Pearce and stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara) have conceived the film’s stunts as extensions of the characters.

Wicked is as enchanting as it is exhausting.

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.

As things spun out of control, getting ever stranger, I started to wonder if the director had merely written himself into a corner and was doubling down on weirdness to get himself out. And yet the film never quite loses its mythic drive. You walk out feeling like you’ve truly had an experience.