Bilge Ebiri

It’s a transcendent performance, somehow both a miracle and the kiss of death. It is good enough to almost elevate the entire movie above its many awkward shortcomings. And yet it also crystallizes those shortcomings.

Him impresses as a stylistic exercise, a gonzo spectacle of macho phantasmagoria, but it’s hollow inside.

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.

After the Hunt might be confused, and it might even be unsatisfying — but it also refuses to coddle anyone, and that feels like some sort of victory.

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.

First Steps certainly has a few potentially provocative ideas rattling around in its tulip-chair-and-tiki-bar brain, but it’s too afraid to explore them in any depth.

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.

Not scary enough to thrill, funny enough to charm, or clever enough to convince, I Know What You Did Last Summer isn’t just forgettable. It’s actively irritating.

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.