Bilge Ebiri

The good news is that Final Reckoning does eventually recover from the calamity of its first hour to give us an entertaining, if still messy, Mission: Impossible movie.

Preminger, an old noir hand, perhaps understood something fundamental about Sagan’s story: It is not one well served by subtlety or realism. Chew-Bose’s effort is nevertheless a noble one. She wants to make this world immersive, convincing, and compelling. She’s good enough to get part of the way there, but I don’t know if the destination was ever in sight.

The picture is dedicated to Hutchins, and its brooding elegance, its rich shadows and evocative close-ups, demonstrates her achievement: Visually, Rust is often astonishing — which of course reminds us all over again of the dark specter hanging over the film.

One to One: John & Yoko becomes not just an enormously moving historical portrait but a freshly relevant and cathartic one.

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

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia is an existential drama masquerading as a comedy masquerading as a thriller.

The villains in this movie aren’t merely cruel and sadistic; they’re also profoundly stupid and incompetent, which actually feels closer to the way things tend to be in the real world.

The Alto Knights is a movie whose ambition has passed. It feels like the husk of something that might have been great once.

These are the intriguing ideas at work in Secret Mall Apartment, but the film works as a movie thanks to the sly way it’s been put together.

Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen take this dumb-clever, fake-movie-science idea and run with it as hard and as fast as they can in one straight direction, using Nate’s condition as an excuse for pure, unchecked mayhem.

Clocking in at 155 minutes, Who by Fire is not short. But it captures the imprecise language and ungainly rhythms of reality so well that you lose sense of time.

There’s something truly off-putting about The Electric State’s palette of junk and colorless branded robots. By trying to give this world such weight and grit, the filmmakers have doubled down on its ugliness.

The jokes might not be the funniest, the bits might not be the wittiest, but it’s all done with such verve and velocity that we might not notice.

Slowly but surely, you settle into its gentle rhythms, and before you know it, it feels like an entire lifetime has passed by.

What’s truly striking about the film is the storybook quality that Anderson has given every single scene.

It feels like a great throwback thriller, one of those movies viewers will still be discovering years from now. Try to see it on a big screen while you can.

Unfortunately, the script and the performances for Cleaner falter before the mayhem starts.

The notion of the self-doubting hero is nothing new. Still, it might have been interesting to pursue, had it been handled here with anything resembling wit, or intelligence, or depth.

Love Hurts feels like it might have once been something, but in its current iteration it exists basically as a series of fight scenes stitched together with the thinnest of narratives. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing — indeed, it could have been a great thing — if the action was in any way inventive or engaging.

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.

It’s one of the best, most alive and inventive performances [Cumberbatch] has given. Unfortunately, the film is even more confused than the character.

In telling the seemingly unremarkable life story of one ordinary man, Clint Bentley’s trancelike film, based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed 2012 novella, ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly.

Director Chaney clearly has a lot of skill and talent. But for all of Rabbit Trap’s technical accomplishments, it’s very hard to be frightened or moved by something that never stops feeling like an exercise in style.

It’s absorbing, suspenseful, and deeply moving — a case study in how to make an effective psychological thriller.

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.

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

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.

Love Me, despite having two incredibly expressive actors at its center, remains furiously literal-minded in its questioning. And unfortunately, the more questions this picture asks, the more maudlin and shallow it becomes.