Bilge Ebiri

Avatar may be derivative, but it’s not insincere. Cameron clearly feels every beat of the story along with his viewer. He lets us discover Pandora through Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) eyes, first as a fearsome, terrifying place, then as a land of unimaginable awe and delight. [2022 re-release]

Narratively, the music in Cold War is a means to an end; emotionally, however, it’s everything, often expressing what the characters cannot say themselves.

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

Getting sucked into these people’s lives means experiencing the story in all its immediacy, sans judgment. Holler is too entertaining and well-made to be overly dour, too full of suspense and throwaway bits of cinematic elegance. It marks the arrival of a major new directorial talent.

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.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower and its eye-popping cavalcade of creations and colors speak not to the shock and awe of technology but to the can-do magic of human achievement.

Campion preserves the simplicity of Savage’s prose with the understated ease of her own storytelling, and she even finds a compelling way to navigate the novel’s somewhat outdated dime-store Freudian conceits.

It tempers its fairly blunt narrative approach by constantly shifting its perspective. It starts off as the portrait of a troubled child, but expands to become a film about community.

Utterly demented and magnificent.

The film is filled with lengthy, sensuous skateboarding scenes, which feel meditative, therapeutic; we sense that these kids skated not because it was fun, but because it helped them to survive.

It’s a perfect role for Bardem, who has always exuded a kind of natural authority and calm. Every line reading is measured without feeling rehearsed. (He’s a great performer, but that wonderfully solid, anvil-shaped profile of his helps, too. Plus, he gets to indulge his fondness for ridiculous wigs again.)

Franco’s own movie works best as a portrait of the complicated friendship between Greg and Tommy, and it’s an inspired idea to have real-life brothers Dave and James play best friends — we can sense alternating undercurrents of exasperation and affection beneath every exchange.

In the end, what shines through First Man is the toughness and resilience of the men whose no-nonsense efforts allowed the rest of us to dream.

The movie’s hectic (albeit very precise) swirl of dialogue creates a background against which the idea of slowing down and directing all your attention towards one thing feels like a genuine rebuke of the world. It’s a simple and obvious enough conceit, but Anderson and his cast have such fun with it that they render it fresh and original.

This small, grim documentary about Indonesia is actually a bigger and grimmer movie about all of us — our capacity for both breathtaking evil and, occasionally, profound bravery.

Hustle works, and it works beautifully, thanks to Sandler’s commitment.

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 has plenty of unflinching truth and emotion and outrage, and it ends with a gut punch. It's the subtly unreal quality of what we're seeing throughout, however, that truly highlights the obscenity of war.

If only all blockbusters could be this exciting, engrossing, and beautiful.

Knowing the real-life inspiration for On the Beach at Night Alone may help one appreciate the film’s moral trajectory a bit better. But the movie’s charms work on a much more immediate level, in the way it captures the ever-shifting dynamic between men and women, and the difficulty of matching one’s feelings to one’s words.

The stranger Tyrel gets, the more accurate it feels. The ecosystem of behaviors and attitudes on display is so unnervingly sharp that some of us may well find ourselves wincing in recognition.

Even at their bleakest, Leigh’s pictures and his people explode with life. Some filmmakers make movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute cinema if the art form ever vanished. Mike Leigh makes movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute humanity if we ever vanished.

Fluctuating between the minor daily occurrences of Kun’s life and his touching sojourns into the past and the future, Hosoda’s film privileges moments of emotion over belabored story mechanics. Thus, it gathers complexity without sacrificing any of its guileless modesty.

Ceylan delivers what might be his funniest, most politically poignant work yet. It also happens to be achingly personal.

It is an uncompromising work that will make many viewers frustrated and even furious. I adored pretty much every single glorious, gorgeous goddamn minute of it.

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.

This amazing, maddening film presents a series of extended, mostly static, terrifying tableaux of despair, poverty, and decay.

Lazzaro Felice has genuine sweep and grandeur, and Rohrwacher’s most impressive feat here might be her ability to find just the right narrative and emotional distance for each section of the story, as it moves from rustic drama to picaresque journey to more pointed social allegory; we’re always given just enough information to understand and appreciate the characters’ interactions and motivations.