Bilge Ebiri

Loro itself becomes somewhat Berlusconian, though associating that pseudo-fascist slimeball with anything this visually resplendent should be some sort of crime.

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.

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

Ten years later, Idiocracy’s real achievement isn’t how much of it has come true, but how much it continues to disturb.

This smallest of films marks a welcome return to the world of interpersonal miniature for the writer-director.

The story works largely on the level of metaphor, but it’s never overbearing or suffocating; there’s life here. A lot of credit should go to the actors, particularly the lead. As the film moves along, García’s face seems to change dramatically.

This is Jolie’s most accomplished work yet.

The result is the kind of ravishing, rousing epic we don’t really get much of anymore.

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

For most of its running time, Arrival is entrancing, intimate, and moving — a sci-fi movie that looks not up at the stars but rather deep within.

It’s not so much an assemblage as it is a conjuring. You don’t just watch these clips — you see through and between them. The juxtapositions create vital, cosmic connections.

[Berg] keeps things simple, tight and taut, and does right by the folks who were there for the real thing. He’s made them the heroes of a genuinely exciting action movie.

Taxi is a strange movie. These are nonprofessional actors, and the film veers between documentary realism and playful staginess.

There are only a couple of jump scares in Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True — mild ones at that — but the movie’s elusive sense of menace lingers for days, weeks, possibly forever. That’s quite an achievement for a film whose premise isn’t particularly novel.

I’ve now seen Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film twice, and I think I might be one more viewing away from finally being able to say what the hell it’s about. That sounds like a condemnation, but a film you need to see again should be a film you want to see again, and the oblique beauty of Goodbye to Language, shot in 3-D, has a tractor-beam-like pull.

The danger of movies based on conceptual wit is that they will lose steam as things proceed and the filmmakers run out of ideas. Thankfully, Maddin and the Johnsons effectively develop their story — goofy and absurd though it may be — so that these constant digs at our ineffectual leaders do coalesce into something meaningful and alarming.

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

The kids’ ambling chatter, the dogs’ routine of rest and play, lull us into a contemplative state, which allows us to better appreciate the mystery of existence.

It’s all garish, nightmarish spectacle — beautiful, terrifying, and poisonous.

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.

John Andreas Andersen’s The Quake, a sequel to the excellent 2015 Norwegian disaster film The Wave, should be required viewing for all of today’s Hollywood franchise jockeys. It shows you how to make one of these things without sacrificing your characters’ souls (or your own, for that matter).

Don’t let the beauty of its images fool you; it’s a supremely confrontational, even infuriating work. It’s hard to know what to make of Trophy, and something tells me the filmmakers wouldn’t want it any other way.

The earnest enthusiasm with which Operation Avalanche begins, and the paranoia and fear toward which it proceeds, chart the course of an entire nation.

The comedy doesn’t build so much as it drones on, understated in form but preposterous in content. It wins us over not so much through belly laughs but by making us feel like we’re privy to a wonderfully bizarre in-joke.

Frozen is one of the few recent films to capture that classic Disney spirit.

It doesn’t always seem to know what it wants to be. But it’s still full of marvels.

The Last Duel is full of incident and historical detail, and its universe is a complicated one — but it seems the script, by its very nature, has ingeniously done all the necessary underlining for us. Even as it pretends to add complexity and context, it simplifies and focuses.

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

While Almodóvar may move his characters around like a god (or at least a moralist), his attention to detail and his fondness for unexpected bits of tenderness give these people shape and dimension and keep the narrative from becoming schematic.

Raluy, a Mexican TV and stage star making her movie debut, is captivating as a woman whose terror at her own behavior is matched only by her bewilderment at the system around her.... But the real star here is Plá, with his total control of the frame.

This is a film of shifting moods and occasionally contradictory narratives. It’s as much about delusion as it is about gentrification, and as much about friendship as it is about solitude.

Origin has instances of raw domestic melodrama, but the emotions are so sincere that it’s hard not to be moved by it all. The film’s depiction of moments out of history is similarly textured.

Sherlock Holmes is totally cool again, which warms my dorky heart.

As the spiritual subtext took over, I couldn’t help but feel that something essential had been lost. The state overwhelms the individual; so, too, by the end, does this beautiful, strange movie.

Connect with the kineticism of Song to Song, and it might just leave you breathless.

Its observations about the disconnect between its elderly protagonist and the society around her are surprisingly relatable.

Ultimately, Dheepan is the story of three people struggling to maintain their humanity, even as they lose their identities.

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.

Like the best studio horror directors, Stevenson understands that we’re not here for logic. The First Omen is soaked in style and mood with images that are both textured and shocking and that tap into tantalizingly visceral fears.

Saturday Night might not be factually accurate, but it feels spiritually true.

The director finds beauty everywhere — in a cloud of dust, a traffic jam, the raucous din of children at play. And wherever such beauty exists, we imagine, hope can never be entirely absent.

Sing Street is far more boisterous and certainly funnier than Once, but it remains in a minor key; “finding happiness in sadness,” is how one character puts it.

It’s not hard to see why Triet’s picture resonates. It has both suspense and intellectual ambition; plot revelations don’t just send the story in new directions, they expand the film’s cultural scope.

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.

Once everything finally collides in The Whale, something shattering and beautiful and honest emerges.

Even with its complicated moral vision, Wouk’s ending reoriented the story’s emotional focus; some might argue it clarified it. Friedkin’s ending leaves you unsure of what to think or feel. It sends you out questioning your beliefs — about war, about service, about madness, even about right and wrong. In that sense, despite the lack of ornament and the reduced scale, this Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is pure Friedkin.

Weiner is about as entertaining as a film about someone destroying a life and career can be. You can't turn away from the car wreck, and Weiner himself can't stop commenting on it.

The Delinquents works its magic on us the way that the promise of freedom works on its characters. It’s a vision of a life unlived — as impossible as it is intoxicating.

It’s a potentially grisly setup, but the actual movie makes death look downright fun.

It’s easy to predict what will happen narratively in Between the Temples, but it’s not nearly as easy to predict what these characters will actually do, what they’ll say and how they’ll act.

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, first and foremost, a visual and sonic experience. We can lose ourselves in it. I think we’re meant to.

It’s occasionally beautiful, but just as often stomach-turning. You watch it at a remove, but still with a dull combination of pity and horror and regret. Maybe that’s the idea. For a brief, agonizing moment, you share the spiritual quicksand with these disgraced men.

The Dry is a beautiful thriller that leaves us not with explanations, but with overwhelming sadness.

Vacation is lazy, idiotic, and gross — and I laughed my ass off at it.

Whenever the film focuses on Gary, it’s O’Connell’s show. And the actor’s ability to quietly express a whole range of emotions with his body language and his eyes, is staggering — especially since, for much of the film, he’s limping and covered in blood.

It’s great not just because we’re eavesdropping on two rock survivors, but also because we’re seeing, in these living legends, the handiwork of the two unsung men to whom this film pays tribute.

I’d urge any viewer to look closely at the lead actress. The emotional journey of the story— and it’s a fairly dramatic one — comes alive and gathers force through her expressions. She is the movie.

Tim’s Vermeer starts off in a playful fashion, but as he soldiers on, our intrepid, mild-mannered technologist finds himself getting emotional. In the presence of art, something happens. By the time it’s over, don’t be surprised if you’re more in awe of the work of an artist than ever before. Maybe this is Penn and Teller’s final, subtle rug-pulling moment: An attempt to demystify the artistic process ends up posing even greater mysteries.

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.

For an hour and a half, this charming little movie, with its chatty talking heads and its sweet-natured subjects, offers a glimpse into the lives of two fascinating people whom I had never heard of, and who shared an unlikely life filled with achievements and setbacks, wonder and pain.

Lee Chang-dong’s dexterity with the telling minutiae of human interactions ensures that Burning makes for an emotionally gripping film. I’m not sure he sticks the landing, however: The finale, while it doesn’t actually resolve anything, felt to me more convenient than convincing. But maybe that’s because I had too much invested in these characters.

Lafleur’s film is a quiet trifle that sneaks up on you, like a pleasant dream you might have and then gradually forget. Its very slightness is its greatest weapon.

By the time the movie is over, we feel, perhaps for the first time, like we’ve gotten to know this legendary, almost mythical figure. Despite the tumult of her life and her singularity as both a person and an artist, this Frida seems downright familiar.

Beneath all the genre theatrics, what comes through most vividly in El Conde are Larraín’s sadness and rage at what happened to his country.

Tykwer sublimates what Eggers made explicit: the joblessness, the debt, the isolation. He knows the power of an image, a gesture, a brief exchange, so he captures those social themes in flashes, which ironically gives them new power.

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.

We know these characters are going through a lot, even if we don’t always see it. And so, this short, ramshackle, shrinking movie manages to stick with you.

Your cousin could have written this movie. But maybe only Wenders could have directed it. He has the sensitivity to shoot the seesawing depths of Yakusho’s face. He has the eye to capture the elegant and diverse architecture of Tokyo’s public bathrooms.

It’s wonderfully inventive filmmaking: Amirpour’s striking compositions borrow from the iconography of both the Western and the horror film — wide, evocative vistas are intercut with dark, tense city streets where shadowy figures follow one another.

As playful as it is, Lenny Abrahamson’s film is mostly a surprisingly earnest story about the compromises and conflicts of art, stardom, and mental illness.

The pressures of the untamed setting, combined with the inability of these characters to ever trust each other, results in an over-the-top melodrama that gets loopier as it goes on. But it pulls us along, too.

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.

Don’t let the politics scare you off, though, for Jimmy’s Hall is a joyous movie. I wasn’t being glib with that earlier mention of "Footloose": Loach’s film isn’t technically a musical, but it has that same spirit, that same let’s-put-on-a-show vitality.

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.

Somehow, gradually, this intimate documentary portrait of one very unique person starts to take on the qualities of a national epic. Through the eyes of this man, we start to see our own country in a different light.

Megalopolis might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy every single batshit second of it.

The Death of Dick Long becomes a symphony of stupidity. I say “symphony” because it’s multivoiced and overpowering. That’s part of the movie’s charm, too: You can feel your brain melting away as you watch it, and that’s not always a bad sensation.

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.

Sisu veers between the elemental and the ethereal. Once it’s over, it feels like you must have dreamed it.

The patient storytelling and the elegant and colorful hand-drawn animation combine to give the film a pleasing, picture-book-like quality that should appeal to kids; there’s something very old-school about the film’s aesthetic. But in some senses, it also feels like a blast of fresh air, not the least because of where, and on whom, it chooses to place its focus.

Piercing is an unnerving mix of loveliness and lunacy.

It’s all quite gorgeous, and surprisingly moving. The Wedding Guest shows just how much you can do with a wisp of a story and a whole lot of cinematic vision.

Is this art or is this prophecy? Is there even a difference?

Beckermann wants not so much to contextualize as to invoke — with the hope, perhaps, that placing us in the middle of this debate will create its own context.

This film nimbly mixes narrative exuberance and emotional depth, flamboyant displays of power with quietly terrifying exchanges. It zips along, combining the highs and lows of a real comic book – all the feeling, color, and wonder, even some of the dopiness – with gloriously cinematic storytelling.

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.

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.

Overall, the lively, unfussy Hampstead goes down easy.

For most of its running time, The Student is immensely compelling, a terrifying ride between hothouse realism and dreamy metaphor. If by the end it feels unresolved, perhaps that’s because the nightmare is far from over.

What’s worse, the songs often distract from the far more interesting real drama occurring onscreen. Kids may find it engaging, but adults may get more restless than usual. Turn the sound down or play your own music over it, and Penguins may well be a near masterpiece.

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.

Certainly for any fan of Cave’s, 20,000 Days on Earth makes for a creative, enthralling journey through the man’s world.

Meeting Gorbachev is a hagiography, but it’s unafraid to position itself as such; Herzog makes his case proudly and passionately.

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.

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.

In the end, What If belongs to Zoe Kazan. And both she and it are wonderful.

It makes for an intriguing combination of tones and rhythms — urgency running up against paralysis — that speaks to the twisted dynamism of our political process, then and now.

They’re great stories, and it’s through them that Jodorowsky’s Dune shows us how the greatest movie never made, in its own crazy little way, somehow still came to be.

Even though she never loses her focus on Nadia, Bombach subtly shifts her attention from Nadia’s specific requests from the international community to the thornier question of what happens to the Yazidis from here onward.

Reeves loves these dead-end apocalyptic environments, and delights in tales that toy with the moral calculus of typical hero narratives. He has given us a Batman that he himself can believe in, not to mention a Batman that feels right for our times.

[A] haunting, beautiful movie.

Hamoud’s three bright actresses bring such a sense of authenticity to their roles that this all feels new.

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.

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.

Oh, Canada might be a movie that was conceived in the long dark night of the soul, but it moves towards brightness and possibility.

Paddington is decidedly, proudly unhip. It’s a lovely, endearing chocolate-box of a movie.

More than anything, this is a slice-of-life tale, whisper-thin but still full of feeling and a generous sense of place. With the world's most adorable dragon at the center of it all.

Purposefully aggravating yet still beautiful, The Mitchells vs. the Machines is both a takedown and a celebration of our dissonant, tech-obsessed world. It gets us.

It is not easy to describe In the Last Days of the City, an immersive visual experience with a wisp of a story and a wellspring of ideas.

The Guilty beautifully demonstrates how people can act with absolute conviction even when they don’t have the full picture of a situation, and the monstrousness this can in turn lead to. And if that doesn’t speak to our time, then I don’t know what does.

Romantic comedies involving people moving on after divorce are a dime a dozen, but rarely are they as generous, sharply observed, and humane as Angus MacLachlan’s Goodbye to All That.

Unlike many modern-day animated films, which find inspiration in fantasy and present us with unique, fanciful designs, the world of The Sea Beast is so realistically rendered, so detailed and physical, that much of the time it feels like a live-action adventure. It’s so thoroughly immersive it might make you believe in sea monsters.

It takes a remarkably assured artist to make all this work, and Fox is savvy about how she eases us into her complicated narrative.

Like a child unwittingly navigating a jungle full of booby traps and deadly creatures, the film walks a treacherously fine line without ever seeming to break a sweat.

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.

The first thing to know about The Diary of a Teenage Girl is that young British actress Powley is staggeringly good in it.

Coming Home works best on a more lived-in, emotional level. It presents a trajectory not uncommon in Zhang's films: a journey from howling passion to somber, almost tragic acceptance.

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

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.

Mia Madre may be a delicate film, but don't be surprised if, in the end, the cumulative power of its humanity obliterates you.

Sion Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland throws so much extreme weirdness and violence at us that we might overlook the fact that there’s method to its madness: Beneath the craziness and cacophony lies a tender, tragic tale of emotional paralysis and a civilization eating away at itself.

Dope isn’t perfect — it’s got a couple too many endings, and it loses the romantic subplot for a distressingly long time. But it moves with amazing energy, the dialogue and soundtrack and imagery a constant stream of pop-culture references, in-jokes, and digressions.

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.

It's also breathtaking to watch a throwaway studio sequel break its corporate chains before your very eyes and become something thrilling and dangerous and alive.

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.

Come to think of it, these are all great roles — for Statham, Plaza, and Hartnett. Everybody in Operation Fortune — yes, even Ritchie — seems to be having fun. Sometimes, that’s all you need.

Air might seem at first like a ridiculous idea for a movie, but it is in fact an ingenious one.

Cop Car does enough things so well for so long that to quibble with its finale feels churlish. This is a film very much worth seeing.

Gabe Polsky's ingenious, touching documentary Red Army looks at the other side of this myth, the seemingly faceless, allegedly robotic players who made up the Soviet team. There, Polsky finds a story even more epic and powerful than the Miracle on Ice.

The easygoing tone of The Gospel of Eureka — sometimes contemplative, sometimes cheerful — distinguishes it from many other documentaries about timely social issues.

Eurovision gives us an inspired and hilarious match between subject and stars, all driven by melodrama: The glorious, over-the-top theatricality of the song contest makes an ideal stage for Ferrell’s brand of high-highs and low-lows.

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

So while Gleason is the slick, moving, sincere documentary you might expect from this material, there’s something else going on beneath the Oscar-friendly polish: This is a remarkably physical film.

It’s a drama, and it smartly uses its little moments of humiliation to open our eyes to a world of delicate, but deep, injustice.

It’s the comic energy generated by the triumvirate of Howerton, Baruchel, and Johnson that really drives BlackBerry, but Johnson and his co-writer Matthew Miller also find lively ways to dramatize the technological concepts at play.

Queen of Earth is a psychodrama shot like a horror movie — "Persona" meets "The Shining." Right down to the haunting, minimalist score (by Keegan DeWitt) that’s perched dangerously, wonderfully between spooky and lyrical.

We know where Tár is headed from pretty much its opening scenes, but that doesn’t mean that the film shouldn’t still surprise and shock us. Luckily, this is where Blanchett comes in, turning the movie from a moderately interesting and topical one into something quite beautiful. She brings the energy and the sensation that much of the rest of the film lacks.

Abu-Assad has made his share of films about the cruel absurdity of life under Israeli occupation, but here he lets all sides have it

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.

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

It’s just escapist enough to fill our disaster-flick needs, but don’t be surprised if Ric Roman Waugh’s film sometimes feels like too much, especially in the middle of an ongoing real-life calamity. To put it a simpler way: Greenland is not just effective; sometimes it’s too effective.

The film’s two sides — the soft, textured reverie of its first half, and the surreal, angular savagery of its second — exist in perpetual balance; one would die without the other.

For all the limitations of its setting and palette, this is a gorgeous, visually exciting movie.

The tale isn't new, nor are the characters, but director Joachim Trier's stylistic and narrative dexterity demands attention: He possesses that rare ability to deconstruct his material without denying us the simple beauties of a well-told story.

About halfway through Resurrection, Rebecca Hall delivers a nearly eight-minute monologue about her character’s past that is so riveting, so mystifying and terrifying that you shouldn’t be surprised if it shows up in every acting class sometime in the near future.

Goodnight Mommy is a very disquieting, very suspenseful film, but proceed with caution.

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.

Finding Dory might be messy, but through its central interplay — between present and past, light and dark, joy and pain — it manages an emotional complexity that puts most supposedly grown-up movies to shame.

Goodman also doesn’t state overtly why the story of the Oklahoma City bombing is so relevant today. He doesn’t have to. His methodical recounting of the rise of white nationalism and fringe movements reverberates with today’s world, in which racist violence and conspiracist lunacy has been emboldened and brought troublingly into the mainstream.

Ford has given us a surprisingly candid peek into the creative process, into the strange little hurts — perceived or real, toxic or justified — that make up the soul of an artist. No, we may not like what we find in there. But I’m not sure he does, either.

Based on a novel by Marco Franzoso, Hungry Hearts is a riveting, relentless film. It may also be an infuriating one, and not always in a good way.

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.

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.

An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada’s directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can’t help but forgive the things it doesn’t.

Zi is fascinating, at times even rapturous.

The Tribe is a harrowing, corrosive film, but there’s great, urgent beauty in it.

Longlegs is terrifying for much of its running time, and it should satisfy most genre fiends. But the greatness that earlier seemed well within its grasp eludes it by the end.

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.

The picture’s charming modesty is its great virtue; it’s a light movie with a heavy heart.

Girls Will Be Girls is a modest work, but like some of the greatest films, it comes to vivid life before our eyes.

Director Stephen Nomura Schible’s understated and moving Coda does a fine job of presenting the composer’s remarkable career as a revelatory journey.

It’s unlikely to make new converts, but it’s filled with vibrant, graceful ass-kickery, and sometimes that’s all one wants, and needs.

Seeing the film now makes you weep for the passing of both actresses, of course. It also drives home the magnitude of losing Carrie Fisher’s hilarious, acerbic, insightful voice at a time when it seems more vital than ever. You leave the movie wanting so much more of her, it hurts.

Jodorowsky’s fondness for the surreal and grotesque is in full evidence here. What makes his films so captivating, however, isn’t their strangeness, but their refusal to divide the world into good and bad, even when it’s easy to do so.

Actress and director build a symphony out of Grandma Wong’s grimaces and her glares. There are emotions in there, but she’s not about to let us get to them, and to her, that easily. And so, we are transfixed.

Belle does have a clear moral compass, but it refuses easy answers and withholds easy judgments. As such, it feels profoundly human.

The Way of Water makes clear that Cameron no longer needs to leave the confines of this (virtual) extrasolar moon in the Alpha Centauri system to create something closer to the heart. He can bend Pandora to his will, and now he’s bent it to make what might be his most earnest film to date.

Lapid’s thrilling use of the camera, the way his unbalanced frame and his imaginative staging work with the precision of his story, results in something new and genuinely unnerving.

This could have easily become a torrid, tear-jerking melodrama, but Hansen-Løve’s matter-of-fact approach to performance and incident allow the emotions to emerge organically from the unfussy drama onscreen.

Maybe this is a mood more than a movie, but it is a haunting one.

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.

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.

Chow is at his best when juggling disparate elements – tragedy, slapstick, romance, melancholy, fantasy. Everything is big with him; he seems incapable of underplaying anything. The crazier his movies, the better. And Journey to the West might be the craziest thing he’s done yet. You may wonder, afterwards, if you dreamt it all.

Valerian is at times so mind-meltingly beautiful and strange that I’m still not sure I didn’t just dream it all.

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

With Jimi: All Is By My Side, writer-director John Ridley tries to do for the rock biopic what Jimi Hendrix did for rock 'n' roll itself in the 1960s — explode it, redefine it, and help it find its best self.

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

The damn thing is fun. Mangold may not have the young Spielberg’s musical flair for extravagant action choreography (who does?), but he is a tougher, leaner director, using a tighter frame and keeping his camera close.

It has an ambling, gory insouciance that might have been more off-putting in a movie not called Cocaine Bear.

While the film does insist on its own irreverence a bit too much at the outset...it offers plenty of lively fun once it settles down, and wisely keeps the pandering to a minimum.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While the film does take some twists and turns — some fairly contrived — it mostly drills down and explores her emotional conundrum without drawing symbolic conclusions about the world we live in.

The cluttered story and the shifts in form might lose you from time to time, but the film conjures some genuinely powerful emotions.

It’s a time-filler, not a time-waster. It’s a film of simple pleasures — but they are pleasures.

The action is creatively staged, without ever getting too intense or scary for young viewers. And the script balances humor, pathos and wish fulfillment as it portrays Alex’s rise from mopey dreamer to confident warrior, without overdoing the mythic portent.

So what makes The Brink so different from just another platform for this professional troll? Though Klayman sticks to a largely vérité approach of following her subject around and observing his various interactions, she also provides important context.

The film is an unshowy but slick underdog sports picture, fluidly told and elegantly mounted. It’s about rowing, for chrissakes; it doesn’t have a post-modern or irreverent bone in its body, and for that, we can be at least a little grateful.

“He’s probably the only man in history who has become famous for trying to kill himself,” says Johnny Carson as he introduces Knievel in a clip from The Tonight Show. As the film makes clear, Evel often bore out that tension in his acts, and it slowly, subtly ate away at him.

Kingsman is full of elaborately orchestrated violence and acrobatic stunt work, shot in fast, sinewy, CGI-enhanced long takes that push and pull our perspective this way and that. It’s all very silly and not really meant to be taken seriously, but as the story gets more and more brutal, something strange happens: We start to care for these cartoonish characters and this absurd scenario.

The imaginative and compassionate leaps of Hong’s other recent films — which spin stories out of the wounded women in the filmmaker’s life — are nowhere to be found. Still, the candor is impressive, and the pain feels real. The Day After may not be a particularly great film, but it does feel like a necessary one.

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.

The picture may not fully cohere, but it has an infectious energy all its own. The Harder They Fall is a mess, but it’s a fun mess.

Borat 2 may not hit quite as many shocking comic highs as the first Borat, but it probably coheres more as a film — ironic, given that it appears to have been written, produced, and edited in record time, during a global crisis — and it also manages to walk a fine line between offense and revelation.

The LEGO Batman Movie is entertaining, but it also sometimes feels less like a spin-off of The LEGO Movie and more like one of its targets.

For all its stridency, Dinosaur 13 isn’t looking to mobilize us or get us to think hard about these issues. It just wants to tell its wild, one-of-a-kind tale in the most engaging way possible, and it does that exceptionally well.

It starts off as a mess, yes, but eventually finds itself in a very poignant place. Even a lesser Terry Gilliam film is usually more engaging and invigorating than most of the other movies out there.

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.

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle is a more troubled beast, the surly goth teen of the Kipling remake pack, with maybe a touch of pyromania and an alarming fondness for blood. Its edges are rougher, and its animation isn’t quite as jaw-dropping. But it’s also beautiful in its own phantasmagoric way.

Tori and Lokita is a film born of rage and frustration, and as such, it’s a moving one. But it’s fair to expect more than just rage from artists — especially our greatest and most empathetic ones.

While it’s broadly predictable in all the usual ways, Creed II admirably toys with our emotional allegiances just enough that we’re not always sure of how we feel about where it’s all headed.

As an honest look into relationships, it's a bust. As a straight-up comedy, though, it’s hilarious.

And yes, it’s all insanely, relentlessly gory. You could say (and some will) that the gratuitousness of the violence in The Raid 2 is a problem. But it all functions as part of the surreal dance of death.

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.

Smulders’s performance makes Unexpected more than worthwhile.

Everest may disappoint those looking for a more awe-inspiring film with big vistas and jaw-dropping stunts and acts of surreal heroism. Unlike many mountain-disaster stories, this is the kind that makes you never want to look at a mountain again.

Apostle is ultimately an absorbing, horrifying movie that’s maybe not as smart as it wants to be. But it is a lot stranger, and more disturbing, than you might expect.

Christopher Robin preaches a return to childhood exuberance and frivolity, but its quiet, focused restraint often feels like it’s coming from a very different impulse — an old-world professionalism and humility. It’s a grown-up sensibility applied to a child’s tale, which makes for an occasionally endearing mixture. In today’s world, I’ll take it.

It may not always succeed, but the lovely, perplexing Winter Sleep is a very personal film from one of the world’s foremost filmmakers. It’s well worth your time.

What comes through are Vaniček’s expert orchestration of suspense, and the cast’s ability to make their characters’ fears feel genuine.

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.

The way Dosunmu shoots her, she feels somehow both fragile and unchanging: It wouldn’t take much to turn Kyra herself into a blur, to erase her from the screen completely; but the broader sorrow that she represents will never go away. Where is Kyra? She’s in the midst of disappearing, but she’s also everywhere.

Playing Teddy Roosevelt in these films was nowhere near a highpoint for Williams, but it did speak to his fondness for these CGI-infused kids’ spectacles. His final farewell here is gentle, reflectively and almost unbearably moving. It lends the the film a retroactive grace.

Ouija is confident, meat-and-potatoes horror, and that’s a lot harder to pull off than it sounds.

This new film doesn’t have the emotional grounding of the original, and it probably dwells too long explaining things we never cared about. But it’s still a visceral, cathartic and — most important — gorgeous two hours of kinetic, poetic bloodshed.

Now, approaching twilight, Eastwood has stripped everything down to its essentials. The picture doesn’t always work, but it works when it has to. It’s a fragile enterprise — lovely to bask in, but liable to fall apart if you stare too hard.

One of the pleasures of a film like this is the knowledge that a new fold is always coming. Seen in that light, occasional narrative implausibilities (of both the psychological and physical kind) recede into the distance. The Outfit is imperfect, but it works perfectly.

Somehow there’s nothing cynical about it. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, instead, a return to form that finds Burton and much of the previous cast getting weird, gross, and, yes, goth in both an idyllic New England town and a gleefully bureaucratic afterlife.

A surprisingly moving tale of friendship and family, dressed up as an adorably frivolous sci-fi comedy.

The way the narrative starts and stops and doubles back mirrors the characters’ own confusion. We try to make sense of the story along with them — who did what, said what, when, and what did it really mean.

That the actors are so good, and the imagery absorbing, also helps paper over some of the film’s weaker elements. Even as we dig into these men’s pasts, Dunham wants to maintain the slightly unreal, allegorical quality of his story.

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.

Like many gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory.

You keep watching not just because she and Brad and the Mediterranean are beautiful, but also because small, surprising details start to take on great importance.

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.

The Forever Purge jumps through a variety of styles and subgenres as it proceeds; some extended sequences will remind you of a Mad Max flick. The hodgepodge is weirdly appropriate.

As a filmmaker, Gibson understands that there is something fundamentally irreconcilable about Doss’ love of peace, his abject and visceral revulsion at battle and a war movie’s embrace of violence. Somehow, the director has made a film that can contain that contradiction — that remains irreducible. He breaks his own movie, and somehow the movie is better for it.

The good news is that within its own little cinematic fantasy realm, Scott Mosier and Yarrow Cheney’s The Grinch manages to be pleasantly moving in its treatment of Seuss’s classic solitary crank. As voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, the Grinch is a surly, sour, but ultimately wounded soul.

It is a terrifically scary movie that I wish were more haunting.

It’s not hard to enjoy Dumbo. Like the circus owners and carnival crackpots who try to exploit the flying elephant for all he’s worth, Tim Burton still knows how to give us what we want. He may think of himself as the tormented freak on display, but he’s also clearly the all-powerful showman, ready to exploit our sense of wonder.

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.

If Monday succeeds as a compelling drama — and, for all the clichés of its story, it does mostly succeed — it’s because Papadimitropoulos and his actors capture the intoxication of new love, as well as the slow-burn agony of the psychological combat that often ensues, with all the small skirmishes and victories and defeats that slowly pick away at a relationship.

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.

Days of Grace is strong, brutal, despairing stuff. It’s also somewhat anticlimactic, by design.

Here are two action stars having fun; watching them work together as a team is a lot more entertaining than you might have expected. Try not to think too hard about it, and Escape Plan is stupid, stupid fun.

While it was often all over the place, it worked, because directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller ladled out the chaos with such charm.

The surprisingly vibrant, hand-drawn images of Have a Nice Day revitalize the story’s more tired elements. It may not give us anything new, but Jian Liu’s film looks lovely and, at 77 minutes, doesn’t overstay its welcome. And sometimes that’s enough.

The resulting film is amiable, pretty, and charming in all the right ways — even if it ultimately settles for a fairly typical tale of a late bloomer finding his way.

For all the fecal matter flying around, and all the dick jokes, Bad Grandpa turns out to be an act of redemption: It’s the anti-Borat. And for all its flaws, it might just be the most heartwarming movie of the year.

Chinese Puzzle isn’t much of a story, but in leaning into and embracing its complications Klapisch is able to isolate little instances — exchanges, glances, fragments from which he can mine profundity. That may feel like a cheat, but it isn’t, because this is a world where the moment conquers all.

We basically know where Laggies is headed; the film is a soft, straight, easy pitch down the middle, story-wise. And it’s a light movie: You won’t get a particularly profound look at adults who act like kids from it.

This is an eerily silent work, full of long pauses and distant, baffling sounds; even the score seems to be mixed low, as if it were drifting through a window, a dark memory. Branagh also plays with the rhythm, using pace and composition to set us ill at ease. Vast stretches of darkness in the frame are cut through with shocks of color.

The film’s brooding tension would probably work even without the recent tragedy of real-life events. But now, while uneven, the film is uniquely involving — right down to a final shot that will break your heart into a million pieces.

Eighth Grade rejects predictable plot points and instead lives on the electric edge of awkwardness and uncertainty and doubt that represents the middle school experience; you never quite know what’s going to happen to Kayla, and that feels right.

Welcome to Me might as well have been called The Kristen Wiig Show, for better or for worse. It makes a splendid showcase for the brilliant actress’s brand of mousy absurdism, and for her ability to modulate tone. The film dances between hilarity and disquiet, between goofiness and pathos. But I’m not even sure it can be called a movie; it feels like a setup and a character in search of a story.

It’s all big, dumb, broad strokes, with plot points visible from miles away. But it works where it matters: The music is fantastic, and the film invests you in its central relationship.

Wingard is also clearly enamored of the synthesized soundtracks of Giallo and John Carpenter films, and here, he turns that into a whole thing, too: A mix Anna makes for David becomes a plot point, giving the director an excuse to practically drench his scenes in dreamy electronica.

The Maze Runner only answers some of the questions it so marvelously sets up. And while I probably now know too much about the story for it to work a similar magic next time, I find myself genuinely anticipating the next one.

Freed from the shackles of elaborate world-building or jokey, family-friendly tentpole-dom, this is a tight, brisk little over-the-top thriller, with plenty of atmosphere, effective jump scares, and a couple of genuinely moving performances at its heart.

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

The kind of documentary that’s smart enough to step back and let its charming subject take over. It won’t break new ground, but it’s not lazy or generic.

For all its breeziness, No Hard Feelings stays with you because its central dynamic feels so surprisingly honest.

Bigelow has crafted a portrait of the 1967 Detroit uprising that manages to be both history lesson and incendiary device, even if it sometimes sputters.

There’s a lot of charm, thought, and feeling in this film version. It expands on the original without dishonoring it.

The anecdotes are mostly on brand for the musicians.

Stone seems genuinely interested in the slow and steady process by which Edward Snowden came to distrust the government that he worked for, and the director has made a slow and steady movie to go with it.