Bilge Ebiri

There’s an unflinching, near-clinical relentlessness to the picture, but therein lies its compassion and empathy.

In the end, Memory’s greatest asset might be that it knows exactly what it is — a fun combination of sleazoid action and surprising emotion. It’s the best kind of B-movie.

In its broad strokes, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a fairly by-the-numbers action comedy, one that sometimes wears Cage’s presence like a talisman against the bad juju of slipshod storytelling. But the talisman works because the film never loses sight of its touchingly nutty premise and because Cage remains a compelling actor.

It’s a lot more like the movie we were worried the first one was going to be: baggy, bloated, and only sporadically engaging.

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.

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.

What makes Ahed’s Knee so powerful is the way the movie detonates before our eyes.

It’s an assemblage of ideas from other popular films that just hangs there with little cohesion. It’s like watching a movie that hasn’t been made yet.

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

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.

Cyrano is a delicate dream of a movie, the kind of film that feels like you might have merely imagined it — light on the surface but long on subconscious impact.

When given the freedom, he can be one of the most overheated of directors, but the excess rarely feels cynical or cheap. In fact, it feels personal. You sense that he wants you to get excited about this stuff because he gets so excited about this stuff.

Part of the fun of movies like this is the opportunity for the audience to immerse themselves in the procedural minutiae of these worlds, but there’s precious little of that here. Everything is so empty, so incomplete. Blacklight feels like a synopsis waiting for a story.

Playground is bleak, bleak stuff. It’s also electrifying.

Jackass Forever is a kinder, gentler Jackass, but thankfully, it’s not a more mature one.

There’s nothing particularly surprising about the story, but Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen finds a way to make an old tale feel new.

The Pink Cloud is so good at portraying our pandemic reality that it becomes harder to discern its other, subtler concerns. I was impressed, agitated, terrified, depressed by this movie — but I also couldn’t help feeling like I had maybe not ultimately seen the film its director wanted me to see.

This new Scream is so determined to be a Scream movie that it forgets the primary, unstated rule established by the original Scream: You can sell anything to us, so long as you make it scary.

While there aren’t any genuine belly laughs in the new movie, there are plenty of modestly likable, chucklesome ones. That ain’t nothing in this terrible, terrible world.

As further demonstration of the director’s already impressive ability to build stomach-gnawing suspense out of everyday interactions, the movie is well worth seeing. But it also represents a step back in some ways. Farhadi is one of the world’s great filmmakers, but the generosity of spirit that was so pivotal to his earlier work seems to be in retreat in his latest.

It’s not just the action and the magic that flop. Even the film’s more intimate moments fall flat.

With previous films like the Oscar-winning Great Beauty and the politically charged biopics Il Divo and Loro, Sorrentino indulged his fondness for boisterous, bunga-bunga stylization. He is contemporary cinema’s mad poet of unchecked hedonism. But he holds himself back this time around. The Hand of God isn’t realistic or gritty (or, God forbid, subtle), but it is more subdued.

Whether this new picture is a masterpiece, or a masterful reimagining of a troublesome original, will have to remain in the eye of the beholder.

In some ways, it encapsulates the director’s best and worst instincts. It might be his most personal film, a genuine effort to understand the connection between two of his key obsessions, spiritual faith and human impulse. It’s also hard to shake the feeling that the film wants to outrage us into a response, but its supposed transgressions often feel tired and pro forma.

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

When King Richard works, it sings.

Branagh wisely gives the movie the quality of a childhood memory, of stolen moments and eavesdropped conversations.

Despite the ticking clock of Finch’s rapidly progressing illness, the movie doesn’t build up much urgency or excitement. The script is pretty thin, almost all premise and little incident. But director Miguel Sapochnik has the eye to make this world compellingly hostile and bleak, and that counts for something.