Bilge Ebiri

It’s a charming movie, with charming characters. Lillis is ideally cast as Nancy, often cheerfully undercutting some of her character’s more precocious proclamations, cracking smiles and reminding us that she’s still a kid.

It succeeds sporadically as a corrective anti-myth, but as a story about people, it fails to come to life.

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.

Despite the visual splendor of this movie — the beautifully animated creatures and elegantly imagined settings — what will ultimately determine whether you respond to this final How to Train Your Dragon is how well you remember the earlier entries. For some, it’ll be a moving conclusion to an epic series. For others, it’ll be one less kids’ franchise to worry about.

Isn’t It Romantic has plenty of fun toying with various familiar elements and sensibilities, but its deconstructions also feel like resurrections.

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

It’s a lively, occasionally powerful history lesson, and an essential reclamation project.

Cold Pursuit ultimately winds up being about how unsatisfying films like Cold Pursuit can be.

A hodgepodge of relationship movie clichés occasionally redeemed by a game cast.

Ultimately, this is Sanders’s show. His performance breathes new life into one of American literature’s most heartbreaking and controversial characters.

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.

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.

Piercing is an unnerving mix of loveliness and lunacy.

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.

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.

The primary pleasure of James Marsh’s understated heist film is the opportunity to watch these icons go from mild-mannered pensioners to snarling, backstabbing hoods. That’s one of its shortcomings, too: We want more, and the picture never quite gives it to us.

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 American Meme can be fun, even informative, but there’s a bigger story here, and Marcus mostly fails to tell it.

Kidman’s performance as this broken, obsessed woman is powerful. Breathless, rasping through her teeth, she conveys both vulnerability and intractability. She seems like she could drop dead at any second, and yet, we also sense that we’re watching someone who has already had to endure the worst life has to give her.

The Transformers franchise has made bloated, histrionic pandemonium such a thing that the modest Bumblebee, for all its derivativeness, feels like a breath of fresh air.

The heist itself, shot mostly underwater, is actually lots of fun.

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).

It feels like overkill. It is overkill. But then again, isn’t that what the Deadpool films are all about? Once Upon a Deadpool, in that sense, feels very much of a piece with the overall series. It’s a sick, dumb joke that you can’t help but laugh at. And as soon as you do, you feel bad about falling for the gag. I wish I could f-[bleep] this movie.

Despite its intense running time and disturbing subject matter, Dead Souls does not seek a complete accounting. In fact, it’s partly about the inability to convey the full horror of these experiences.

One of the strangest films I’ve seen this year, Clara’s Ghost is a twisted, slippery little whisper of a thing that refuses to let itself be easily defined.

On its surface, Dumplin’ is a slight, charming comedy about beauty pageants and learning to be yourself, but watch closely enough and you might see some of the new moves it brings to an otherwise predictable routine.

It’s hard to untangle the film’s many bizarre indulgences, which at times seem intended to titillate as much as disturb, and yet somehow do neither. It’s all a bit too ludicrous to be sensuous or unsettling, or ultimately all that insightful.

To go with its bizarre plotting and shrill performances, the film seems to have been edited in a Cuisinart. But those are the least of its crimes.

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.

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.

I walked away from this picture both moved and confused. Because it’s got Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz in top form, The Mercy nails the emotion, but comes up somewhat short as a narrative.

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.

Somewhere amid the film’s ornate imagery and deliriously irreverent humor, we might begin to realize that we’re watching a terrifying, incisive satire about the ways that a life lived online makes monsters of us all.

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.

It’s enough to make me wonder if this series might still have a few decent tricks left up its sleeve. We’ll see. This movie’s a bust, but I’ll let myself remain hopeful.

Instant Family is a surprisingly foul-mouthed, filled-to-bursting roller coaster of a comedy-melodrama that tosses you in eight different directions before leaving you a teary, conflicted mess. And when it works, it’s genuinely funny and moving. But when it doesn’t, hoo boy, it’s atrocious.

Jonathan is good enough for us to want it to be better.

This is an atmospheric, well-acted film that leaves us mostly cold.

The result was one of the most acclaimed albums of her career — and one of the most elusive film projects of all time, full of twists and turns that would have made Orson Welles order a stiff drink.

The film never stops loving these characters. Mantzoukas brilliantly juggles all the different forces of Richard’s personality so that we never quite know what to make of this guy, which in turn means that we never quite know what will happen next with him and Nat.

Everything has been watered down: the intensity of the hero, the sense of sexual danger, the violence.

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.

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.

As seen in the film’s terrifying opening and its gruesome climax, Avery deftly orchestrates some grisly, intense set pieces. He delivers on the thrills, even if the story leaves something to be desired.

The film’s elegant compositions themselves are painterly, with the actors carefully posed; and the atmosphere is theatrical, with crisp line readings and sparsely populated frames. Those elements, plus a meandering story line, may not make for a particularly involving narrative experience. But it sure is nice to look at.

With this documentary, Morgan Neville has made a movie about Orson Welles that would have transfixed the great master himself.

It’s a mess, whatever it is, but it’s not without its charms.

The artistry here lies in the mutations and permutations of language and rhythm that are spoken onscreen. Bodied is uneven, but it has the fire where it counts.

Clark likes to linger on close-ups of intertwined naked bodies, and he seems to admire these characters’ freedom. But ultimately, it all feels whisper thin: The film, already quite short, doesn’t offer enough about any of these people for us to care genuinely about what happens to them.

It’s an artful portrait of a world that refuses the order we try to impose on it when we close ourselves off to heartache, doubt and pain.

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.

Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory has an immense cast, a deliberate pace and thematic ambition to spare — but it also has a ground-level, plain-spoken modesty that renders it hypnotic.

The focus on the workings of an American institution may remind some of the expansive comedies of Robert Altman or the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. But also, the blurring of the line between performance and reality, the embrace of an intimate theatricality, recalls the work of Jacques Rivette. These are cinematic giants, and this director may be on his way to joining them.

The film doesn’t offer many huge belly laughs — Atkinson has never been one for big comic climaxes — but it does deliver a fairly steady stream of pleasant chuckles, many of them mixed with generous doses of humiliation comedy.

Hunter Killer won’t win any awards for originality, but it may win a couple for the brazenness with which it stacks clichés upon clichés. Basically, it’s "Crimson Tide" meets "Lone Survivor" meets "Under Siege" meets a Russian variation on "Olympus Has Fallen," with a bit of "Geostorm" thrown in. At least three of those movies are pretty good, so the overall math works in the film’s favor.

The not-so-good news is that Mid90s never quite manages to make an impact, in part because it gives us so little to hang onto with the characters onscreen.

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.

The pitch-black and paper-thin Galveston not only fails to find a way to reinvent, or at least refresh, that old tired idea, it also piles a few more tired ideas on top of it.

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.

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.

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.

It replicates the template and the atmosphere of the original, but it lacks invention and emotional investment.

Swift, entertaining documentary.

The director purposefully pulls us this way and that, weaving cinematic spells and then yanking us out of them; as viewers, we are both inside and outside the story.

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.

By sticking to his impressionistic perspective, by fracturing his narrative, Ross achieves something genuinely poetic — a film whose very lightness is the key to its depth.

This new version, directed by Danish filmmaker Michael Noer, brings to the story a refreshing intensity and sweep, and even a sense of adventure.

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.

A cinematic centrifuge of acrobatic stunt work, breakneck chases and immersive action, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a perfectly calibrated piece of filmmaking that plays the viewer like a drum right from the start.

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.

For all its frantic eager-to-please-ness, Hotel Transylvania 3 doesn’t quite achieve the blissfully reliable drumbeat of hilarious throwaway gags that the earlier films managed.

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

The First Purge actually pulls back somewhat on that sense of bloodthirsty anticipation. The violence here feels more tragic than ever, and it’s also some time coming; when Purge Night does start, the killing doesn’t begin immediately.

It’s disjointed, and cluttered, but it’s also entertaining in spurts. Is that enough? Just about, and not quite. Ant-Man and the Wasp overloads and underachieves, but it also never entirely squanders the first film’s good will.

No matter how much they remind us that this is all based on a true story, at heart Tag is still a dumb, goofy Hollywood comedy with big stars running around making glorious asses of themselves. It’d be a pretty good one, too, were it not so afraid to embrace its essence.

Incredibles 2 is at its best — which is to say, its funniest and most exciting — when it tackles the internal dynamics of the family itself.

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.

Sobel lets these conflicting feelings hang in the air, offering no pat conclusions, or convenient corporate bogeymen. By refusing to resolve or reconcile these contradictions, he ensures that we’ll keep thinking about them.

It looks and feels familiar, and in an era where studio filmmaking has increasingly become an extension of brand management, that should make a lot of people happy. But I can’t say it made me particularly happy.

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.

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

Honoré’s scenes feel at once composed and curiously mundane, as if he’s trying to take the precision of his earlier work and mix it with a more realist impulse — or, if we’re being less charitable, as if he’s trying to will his aesthetic into something more “mature.”

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.

Mitchell has interesting ideas, and his actors seem to be having fun, but that’s not enough when the film itself lacks atmosphere, or tension, or emotional engagement.

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.

A movie can and should stand on its own, of course, but it still needs to find a way to give weight and scope to this intimate miniature. And while Dominic Cooke’s film succeeds at much of what it attempts, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a dimension missing.

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.

Climax isn’t so much about the inevitability of chaos, but about the sadness of watching something beautiful fall apart. And it is never less than electrifying.

It’s alternatingly comic, heroic, tragic, horrifying, ridiculous, dead serious, clear-eyed, and confused; it shifts into moments of documentary and even essay film, but it’s also one of Lee’s more entertaining and vibrantly constructed works. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie exploit its tonal mismatches so voraciously and purposefully.

As a longtime admirer of the director’s work, I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but the most shocking thing I found about The House That Jack Built is how tedious it is. A shame, because The House That Jack Built feels like a genuinely sincere attempt on the filmmaker’s part to wrestle with the legacy of his creation.

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.

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.

As a work of feel-good advocacy, it checks pretty much all the boxes, making its way through the key cases of her career, while also offering a personal look at the woman herself. Yet it’s hard not to want more from RBG, precisely because its subject is so remarkable and her ideas so consequential.

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.

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 House of Tomorrow sticks to a time-tested coming-of-age template that’s as common in the indie world as the superhero origin story is in the studio world. But there’s good news, too: When it’s not busy hitting the usual notes, Peter Livolsi’s film, which is based on a novel by Peter Bognanni, manages to be a touching exploration of what “tomorrow” actually means.

At times the film seems to struggle to find the right aperture: It hints at elements I wanted to know more about, and occasionally goes into avenues that seem to distract from Pauline’s compelling storyline.

Schumer remains likable, and the film has its moments, but there are so many excellent opportunities here for poignant cringe comedy that more often than not I Feel Pretty feels like a missed opportunity — and a slow, ponderous one at that.

Zhao takes a different approach, privileging the narrative, the poetry, and the realism in equal measure, blending them together to create something astonishingly powerful.

There’s little in Paul, Apostle of Christ that’s not predictable, but the film engages honestly enough with its ideas that at times it feels like a small…well, let’s not use the word miracle in this case. It doesn’t shy away from complexity, and for that we can all be grateful — believers and heathens alike.

Ready Player One is entertaining enough, and it’s certainly well-made, but what truly stands out is the filmmaker’s prevailing-present sense of bemused disgust at the way his offspring are spending their time. He can’t go home again, and he knows it.

Anderson has a sharp grasp of slapstick and visual humor, and he uses deadpan about as well as anybody since the great silent comedians. But for all the laughs and the social resonance, Anderson and his team have first and foremost conjured a work of spellbinding loveliness.

My dad took me. He was a film critic and he’d already seen it for work, but then he took me opening weekend and fell asleep while I watched it. He did that a lot. But I think he liked it. I guess he wouldn’t have gone to see it again if he didn’t. What kind of idiot does that?

The Hurricane Heist delivers what it promises on some basic level; it’s got plenty of hurricane, and it’s got plenty of heist. But those looking for Sharknado-style idiocy will probably be disappointed, as will those looking for anything that makes sense. That might be the film’s fundamental problem.

They Remain wants to unsettle us and invade our brains. Instead, what little power it has vanishes long before the credits roll. What remains is tedium.

For all its airy lightness and apparent simplicity, it’s hard not to watch Claire’s Camera and sense beneath its placid surfaces the fretful voice of a filmmaker who longs to return to the elements of his art.

The Death of Stalin would be a brilliant, harrowing film even without all that contemporary resonance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Aside from being a disarming, refreshing wallow in kindness, Paddington 2 also has the benefit of being well-constructed and exceedingly well-performed.

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

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.

It’s easy to appreciate the director’s eye even while being left mostly cold by everything else. It’s almost as if, in trying to make a film about the gilded prison of wealth, Ridley Scott has made one about the gilded prison of empty, beautiful images.

Most tales of people finding love present hard, angular worlds and allow romance to soften the edges. Phantom Thread does the opposite: It presents a soft, even sensuous world, and shows us how sometimes love can come in the cuts and the tears.

Writer-director Rian Johnson has certainly made the busiest Star Wars film of them all, but he keeps it from becoming a slog by infusing it with humor, verve, and visual charm.

It speaks both to del Toro’s confidence and generosity that, having designed this world so thoroughly, he essentially hands the whole thing over to Hawkins — not just so she can breathe life into her own character, but so she can conjure all the emotional connections required for any of this to work on any level. And my god, how she runs with it.

The Post is a tale that weaponizes nostalgia. It depicts how this long-established system of chummy collusion between politicians and press, one at times recalled with some anxious wistfulness by both Bradlee and Graham, came to be shattered. And it shows us how a strong press was instrumental in that shattering.

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.

Two representative moments define Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless — and they are among the most devastating, harrowing things I’ve ever seen on a screen.

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.

The joints show, and the cuts are sometimes awkward — there was clearly a longer, more d-r-a-w-n o-u-t version of this at some point — but what’s left after the cutting is fun and engaging enough, and it’s all anchored by terrific lead performances. There were even times when (gasp) it moved me.

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.

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.

It’s somber and respectful, and even has a couple of genuinely powerful moments, but none of that’s enough to transcend its oppressive dreariness.

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.

Östlund is specific and exacting as a writer and director, and within The Square’s empty spaces, we’re forced to confront our own values, and our own visions of ourselves.

There is so much packed in here; Wonderstruck is simultaneously the densest and loosest film Haynes has made. And, like many stories based on books for children, much of it makes more emotional than logical sense.

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

This doc could have been a mess, frankly. But Philippe has put the film together smartly, taking us from the general to the particular.

Only the Brave is a visually splendid, spellbinding, and surreal movie that also happens to be an emotionally shattering, over-the-top ugly-cry for the ages.

There’s nothing wrong with stylization and opening things up (usually, these are good things), and Andrews has impressive command of his frame. But here, the extra-cinematic adornments seem somewhat unnecessary, as Una’s chief power lies in its two striking lead performances.

It’s a beautiful movie about unthinkable things.

Careful, dutiful, and beautiful, Blade Runner 2049 cannot achieve the sublime slipperiness of Scott’s masterpiece. Whether it even needs to is up to you.

American Made is his first effort in a long while that feels like an honest-to-god Tom Cruise movie; suddenly, his smile means something again. But there’s one huge, beautiful catch: Doug Liman’s electric film is clear-eyed about the cynicism and corruption beneath its hero’s anxious grin. It voraciously breaks down both the star and the country he has symbolized for so much of his career.

Over the course of its simple, unadorned 82 minutes, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Hissein Habré: A Chadian Tragedy wrecks you in ways you might not have known were possible.

The movie has its moments, but the bloat and the blandness take their toll.

Brad’s Status remains grounded in reality — it’s gentle, human and unresolved. I loved it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch it again.

What exactly does it all mean? I’m not sure, but it does make for a disturbing and occasionally absorbing watch.

This is Jolie’s most accomplished work yet.

The Force is hypnotic and eye-opening. Nicks has a style that is both experiential and ethereal: From its ground-level immersion in the minutiae of police work to its sweeping helicopter shots of the city at night, The Force has the texture of a Michael Mann film combined with the clarity of a Frederick Wiseman documentary.

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

The critic seems less interested in the scares and the suspense — a shame, since IT is filled with them — and more in the kids themselves.

What emerges is a very close, tender look at the Ford family.... The film is unflinching in its portrayal of their devastation after the loss of their eldest son.

The Villainess is entertaining enough, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that we should be caring more for this character as the film goes on, not less.

As Colin, Stanfield is exceptional, his visage a mixture of bewilderment, humiliation, and simmering rage. His performance grounds the film, and keeps it going through its less confident patches.

I walked away from After Love feeling like I knew precious little about these characters. Lafosse gets so many critical things right about this decaying relationship that, at first, I did not wonder too much about the lack of specificity or detail about them as people. But later, it gnawed at me.

It is entertaining, and often touching, even if it pulls back right when it should be going totally nuts.

The boy is but a shell; it’s the men and women around him who truly come to life in this chaotic, awkward, and sporadically moving film.

Sheridan’s feel for psychology and setting are in fine evidence here. Wind River’s landscapes are forbidding and beautiful.

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.

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.

The film is boldly bad, yes, but also boldly boring.

Nolan fully embraces the power of visual storytelling in Dunkirk.

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

Baby Driver is an almost perfect pastiche, a thoroughly enjoyable object. But sue me, I kind of miss the losers of the Cornetto Trilogy.

The effects are incredible, the action is exciting, the music is great, and Andy Serkis, once again embodying a non-human character through motion-capture technology, remains terrific. But there’s something more here.

Haneke has delivered the Haneke film that Haneke-haters see in their heads when they think of a Haneke film: a series of disjointed, narratively oblique episodes showing people being inhumane to each other.

The Meyerowitz Stories doesn’t quite have the drive and stylistic panache of other recent Baumbach efforts, but it makes up for that with sincerity, as well as moments of subtle satirical genius.

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.

Coppola’s a master at taking something that could be portentous and rendering it delicate, thereby reclaiming its depth.

onceuponatimejsogrjdvpvarivpaeimp grfggjsfsfpoemichaelbaycouldbringbeautytoanactionsceneeeevgrhcgg oiwxgamanicpoetryfilledwithkineticgraceandheroismgjvbbp mnfwdwdwkpad3dkkalikewhateverhappenedtoTHATguy

For most of its running time — thanks to director Young’s visual rigor and the excellent performances of its leads — Bwoy keeps us in this cinematic fugue state, where reality only peeks through in brief flashes.

It’s a complex subject, to say the least. And the film struggles at times with trying to make parodic jabs at a serious topic – it never quite seems to go far enough with its satire. But Pitt’s ridiculous, wildly over-the-top performance somehow keeps it all together. Whenever he’s onscreen, the film finds its soul, its heart, and its funny bone.

The Mummy turns out to be a drab, nonsensical affair that squanders its potential for humor, atmosphere and sweep.

Akin holds nothing back, and Kruger, starring in a German film for the first time in her career, brings the grief and anger and pain to life — never overdoing any of it, yet refusing to submerge it.

A transcendent, at times almost dangerous film.

As Berlin Syndrome proceeds, however, we start to feel like we’re drowning in atmosphere, and it gets harder and harder to stay interested in what happens next.

There’s a lot to chew on here, but in the end, I wish Okja simply worked better as a movie.

The glue that should turn these individual moments into something resembling a unified cinematic experience just isn’t there. The Commune feels like fragments of a far more interesting film, haphazardly stitched together.

King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy.

If in the end it doesn’t quite work — if its many fascinating pieces and ideas and odds and ends don’t ever cohere into a whole — lament not what might have been. Instead, be grateful that Ridley Scott has lost none of his ability to provoke, captivate and infuriate.

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.

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.

Gradually, the old-world meticulousness of Gray's filmmaking gives way to something more abstract, a drifting impermanence, as if the director were trying to capture — without losing any of his visual grace or sweep — the wide, beautiful unknowability of existence.

Ghost in the Shell looks great, sounds great and has a gaping hole at its center — where its emotional core should be.

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

I walked out of After the Storm wanting to be a better person — and further convinced that Hirokazu Kore-eda isn't just one of the world's best filmmakers, but one of its most indispensable artists.

Structurally, there’s little that’s new in Suntan. The tale of a middle-aged man delusionally pursuing youth and beauty reaches back to Thomas Mann and beyond. But Papadimitropoulos has a feel for the physicality of this world, for contrasting postures and gestures.

In the struggle between sober subtext and monster-movie goofiness, the goofiness mostly wins out.

In its blunt, inelegant, but surprisingly gripping way, Catfight is the (im)perfect movie for our rotten times.

Thanks to that cast, and some savvy direction, you might very well enjoy Fist Fight. But don’t be surprised if it also leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

In Logan, we have an example of a superhero story taken to new extremes and a franchise to a spare, sad, apocalyptic finish (or “finish”), with R-rated action scenes that are both rousing and unbearably violent.

As pure spectacle, The Great Wall is absolutely dazzling. It may be a studio release, but the constant sense of invention, the go-for-broke intricacy of its battle scenes, feels very much of a piece with Chinese action fantasy flicks.

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.

In its own pleasantly dreamy and lilting way, the film embodies what it preaches: As life gets rougher, people endure not by hardening themselves even further, but by continuing to find the freedom to be kind. In Istanbul, the chaos never really stops. Kedi slyly reminds us that the humanity, too, has always been there.

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.

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.

There isn’t a single second that doesn’t ring as achingly true.

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.

For the vast majority of its running time, The Big Sick astutely pulls you between the twin poles of agony and glee.

Watching The Salesman, I can’t help but feel that this is the first time Farhadi’s mastery of the particular is undercut by the artificiality with which he’s treated the general. He remains one of the world’s foremost filmmakers, but this time around, his expertise and artistry are undone by phoniness.

The Incredible Jessica James strikes me as little more than an extended sketch – somewhat formless and repetitive. But its saving grace is that, unlike a lot of sketch movies, it doesn’t rely on shtick or wink-wink contrivance.

Lynskey’s shivering rage and Wood’s Zen incompetence play off beautifully against each other, and Blair deftly juggles the suspense, humor and social overtones of his script. Until, that is, the film’s final 30 or 40 minutes, when he settles for genre schlock and the revelatory film we thought we were watching devolves into a less interesting, more familiar one.

It feels like a rushed journey through a vital, many-pronged debate.

In the end, for all the artistry on display, The Ardennes is more admirable than inspiring. It has style, and even suspense, but relatively little imagination.

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.

With each step, the film gains depth. Small variations in routine start to feel monumental, and the briefest encounter can seem like a sign of something great.

Somewhere inside the 128-minute Live by Night is a reasonably solid 168-minute movie struggling to get out. No, that’s not a typo: You can sense the contours of an absorbing story as writer/director/star Ben Affleck’s slapdash and fragmented assemblage limps along. Most of the pieces are there, but they remain pieces.

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.

It would be easy to call Passengers out for its troublesome sexual politics or its way-too-predictable genre contrivances, but really, that’d be giving it too much credit. The problem lies deeper, in the fact that it’s a clever set-up in search of an execution.

Rogue One's creators clearly want to move us deeply — several major plot developments should pack an overwhelming emotional wallop — but they haven’t given this talented cast enough to work with. It’s fast, loud, even lovely — and not terribly engaging.

As we watch this woman lose her family, her status, and maybe even some part of her pride, we sense both the horror and the intoxication of freedom.

It’s funny, joyful, and sweet, and yet down below, running beneath everything, is a sad counter-narrative about how the world always throws obstacles in your way, and how you could just turn your back and retreat.

Allied doesn’t deliver any particularly shocking twists or turns; the real surprise here is how much a well-told, well-acted tale can still resonate.

In 120 frames a second, both Alwyn and Stewart came off as hopelessly stilted; at 24 frames, they breathe with life. But lose the flicker, and you lose the spell.

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.

Fantastic Beasts is often lovely to look at, at times even stirring, but there's very little to hold on to, story- or character-wise.

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.

Loving downplays the historical significance of its subject in favor of a quiet humanity.

Take the Dan Brown out of a Dan Brown movie and all you’re left with is Tom Hanks jogging in mild irritation.

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 breach between these two worlds is part of Rosi’s formal and moral gambit.

There’s no mystery, and the action is thoroughly disposable, but what works this time around are the interactions between Reacher and Turner, mostly thanks to the efforts of Smulders, who brings an impassioned frustration to her character.

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.

It’s as if somebody wrote out the basic setup, figured they would flesh out the character bits and plot twists and jokes later … and then never got around to it. It’s dispiriting and infuriating all at once.

Through the recollections of witnesses and victims, the film simultaneously builds a present-tense narrative while portraying the terrifying resilience of memory and trauma.

[An] inspiring cinematic journey — full of overwhelming beauty, and ready to set the curious viewer's mind aflame.

[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.

The film takes an allegorical, symbolic story and sets it within a milieu that suggests authentic life. But it never quite reconciles the tonal dissonance at the heart of this idea — there's great emotional potential here, but we experience the whole thing at a remove.

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.

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.

All this could have easily become a cacophony of disconnected sights and sounds, but Cameraperson unfolds with beauty and purpose — mixing the fluidity of a dream with the acuity of an essay. Johnson teases out themes and finds echoes across the years.

All that bravura filmmaking — the elaborate camera moves and colorful images and unexpected angles — is fascinating from both technical and aesthetic standpoints, and it certainly held my attention. But don’t be surprised if you start to suspect that, for all the film’s ornamentation, it might not be leading up to something revelatory.

Faucon has built his story around very gentle, glancing blows. But this is not the focused austerity of a Robert Bresson; the director’s level distance and jaded eye lead more to lifelessness than a revealing simplicity of expression.

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

From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won't say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain.

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

David Ayer's film may not always work, but when it does, it's a perverse delight.

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.

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.

Even when it comes to life, Jason Bourne offers very little that could stand on its own; its best scenes remind you of even better ones in the earlier films. There's a greatest-hits quality to the movie, only the band is tired and its heart isn't in it.

That Feuerzeig can navigate this hall of mirrors so cleanly and effectively is positively supernatural.

The movie is less about making a grand social statement and more about conveying the ground-level desolation of this world. Riccobono films it all with intelligence, sensitivity, and a feel for offhand poetry; his camera captures moments of intimacy and tension without ever quite intruding.

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.

Star Trek Beyond might be the Star Trekkiest film of the new, J.J. Abrams–ified Trek era. That is to say, it's the one that feels the most like a turbo-loaded episode of the original series, and has at least some of that classic spirit of exploration and derring-do.

We're left with an idea of passion instead of a real depiction of it. And a movie that can't stop wallowing in its own emptiness.

Lovely visuals, terrific performances, renewed ambition: There's enough good in Café Society to make it worth your while — and also to make you wish it were better.

The Secret Life of Pets is an ADD-addled mess of a movie — and that, amazingly, is its charm.

If The Purge: Election Year is ultimately still engaging, it’s largely because of the irresistibility of the basic concept itself. But this new movie also makes a pretty good case for why the series should end here: Things have not only come to their logical conclusion, but you get the curious sense that the filmmakers have run out of ideas.

Diligent and informative but also fragmented and inert, it plays like a series of scenes and notes for a longer, more fleshed-out movie.

Central Intelligence won’t blow you out of the theater, but you might be surprised at how well it works — how genuinely funny it is — given the familiarity of this concept.

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.

Paltrow and Baumbach don't get fancy with the filmmaking. They're smart enough to let De Palma's own resonant images — his gorgeous compositions, his smooth camera moves — do much of the work.

Wan is coming off the world-conquering success of his wildly entertaining automotive action sequel Furious Seven, and he sometimes seems to be trying to bring the splashy cacophony of that movie into a world that thrives on sparseness and focus. It doesn’t work.

For all the film's aestheticism, there's a clarity to this child's dilemma — conveyed ably by Hightower, who is a unique kind of actress.

Unfortunately, as Mohammed approaches his goal, Abu-Assad goes all in on archival footage.... That backfires.

The film suffers from the one thing that Spielberg films almost never suffer from — stasis. He’s made, essentially, a "hangout" movie, one in which we’re supposed to luxuriate among the characters, but Spielberg isn’t a director who thrives in that kind of environment.

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.

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 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.

The most interesting part of Elstree 1976 comes when these actors express ambivalence about their odd celebrity.

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

I never found myself genuinely wondering what was going to happen next; the moves are too familiar. Even the big fight, entertaining as it is, feels like it's there not because of dramatic inevitability, but because somebody behind a desk decided it had to be. It's just a bunch of stuff.

Bulgarian filmmaker Maya Vitkova's feature debut, Viktoria, is an impressive display of stylistic control and directorial vision, even if it doesn't always hold together.

In the end, The Man Who Knew Infinity never allows itself to transcend the sad irony of such biopics — that people known for thinking outside the box are always given film portraits that refuse to do so.

The film absolutely delivers on the scenery-chewing front. And yet the movie is still hollow and joyless.

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.

Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room is an impeccably crafted cinematic torture machine — in the best possible way.

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

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.

Gyllenhaal and Watts's yin-yang performances help things along.

James Napier Robertson's film combines several potentially tired subgenres — the inspirational-teacher drama, the mental illness drama, and the gang thriller — but, helped immeasurably by Curtis's performance, makes something new out of them.

The experience of watching this film is one of reflective exuberance. It's a movie about people who arrive sure of themselves and depart in the quiet confidence that all they know is that they know nothing.

The movie's not bad but it doubles down on its least-interesting and potent elements at the expense of those that actually work. In the end, the film is as forgettable as the dime-store philosophy that fuels it.

On the evidence of the first half of Baskin alone, Evrenol seems to be a filmmaker who understands character, tension, and terror. Now all he needs is some follow-through.

There's little drama here, but there is a touching sense of reflection.

The actors still give it their all in Allegiant, but there's only so much they can do with such a clunky, verbose script. And on the rare occasion that the film actually quiets its characters down and delivers something resembling action, it's woefully inert.

Nichols has a light touch when it comes to genre, which is Midnight Special's great blessing and curse.

Mostly, The Brothers Grimsby simply wants to make you laugh. And it will. Whether you're laughing because the jokes are actually funny or because you can't quite believe that you just saw what you did...well, that's between you and your god.

Lolo is a fun, airy movie, but it's also unafraid of complexity.