Blake Goble

By minimalizing his loftier techniques and tendencies of the past with brusque pacing and grand photography, Nolan has assembled the leanest and most impassioned film of his career.

Inside Out is a superlative work of inspired imagination, one that may very well stay in your mind for a very long time.

Phoenix is a death-defying melodrama of rare emotional obsession.

It’s beyond playful. Wonderful and whimsical, for that matter. Fun to look at and completely immersive. It’s hilarious, heartfelt, and humane, as well. It’s even a tad sagely in its universally appealing lessons of manners, sympathy, and open-mindedness.

The script feels like a great writers-room comedy, where only the leanest and meanest bits stay, and the most startling and intriguing ideas persist. It functions comedically and historically — the jokes have something to say about power.

Arnaud Desplechin delivers a thrilling reminiscence that romanticizes and believes in youth’s ungraceful but intense splendors.

Little Men is a summer breeze, with rich melodrama and an easygoing mood, built up around two great kids and their troubled families that says more than any after-school special. It’s an episode of actual experience, presented in lovingly natural, minimalist strokes.

It’s a harrowing moral fable, a political fable, and above all, a deft lament.

It’s fine. It’s nice, pleasing, and capable of mustering amazement from time to time at what Rogers did. This callback to one of television’s greatest pioneers shows why he meant so much to so many, and what we could still learn from him today.

It’s Hollyweird love letter material, but it’s glittered with Tarantino’s signature wise-ass attitude. Here he’s part historian, and part aging, experimental auteur.

The film possesses a quiet, considered tension that draws the viewer in.

You know the formula and frankly, it’s one of the best-working ones Hollywood still has: a fun-for-the-whole-family film. In a current market crowded with franchises and pricey theatrics, Toy Story 4 feels like a warm and welcome aside, spinning an epic yarn from an intimate vantage with all the amenities of Pixar’s supremely talented creators and animators.

At times amusing, at others analytical, De Palma is both an homage and a lecture.

BlacKkKlansman is a well-formed and compelling work of pulp escapism.

It’s the kind of film that ultimately makes you count your blessings, root for the good guys, and maybe even shed a tear or two at the sight of the press kicking ass.

Transit is a walkabout potobiler that ruminates more often than it feels compelled to run. It’s brutal, stark, dry, compelling, rich, and all the other drastic hyperbole that one can only bestow upon a genre-bending experiment like this one.

The slow build of Da 5 Bloods leads to as powerful a finale as any you’ll find in Lee’s arsenal. And it’s one that should hit rather hard as it arrives in the middle of a summer where race will be discussed at volumes.

MLK/FBI justifies itself as a compelling addendum to King’s legacy, not simply as a heart-rending unveiling of past tragedy and maliciously tarnished greatness.

Wardle allows the details to roll out with impact, and even some insight. Curiosity for the grand genetic schemes is a great sell, but the human element, the lament for lost time, truth, and family? That sticks at the end.

While the movie’s a letdown in the remake and modernization departments, it’s at least a modest success in terms of ebullient talent and frothy farce.

While it deals in the traditional melodramatics, straight from the ‘ol Hollywood emotion factory, Tillman Jr.’s aim seems true. The Hate U Give feels so Right Damn Now that you could leave the theater and see its stories on the nightly news.

The way Right Now, Wrong Then yields different results, moods, and beats as the result of minor shake-ups in the opening scenes is beyond fascinating, often charming, and at times amusingly uncomfortable.

Here’s a cocktail so potent that it may just snap even the most tired and cynical viewers out of apathy.

Here’s a documentary with plenty of courage in its convictions, and a teachable exercise about modern health problems.

One critic’s ‘too much’ may be another’s ‘so much to unpack’. But that’s the thing. The style, the lament, the punchy rhythm and breathless momentum of The Other Side may be hefty, but it certainly makes a dent.

Eddie the Eagle trips plenty, but Eddie, insufferable as he may be, represents the people that in spite of failure being visible at the bottom of a 90-meter ski drop, still take that leap.

Perhaps the film’s most striking quality is its restraint. Thematically and stylistically, it’s a film of quiet medium shots, long takes, and clear but evasive words. Every choice is tiny, but humane and usually deliberate.

Profound and illusory, Silence shows Martin Scorsese at the confessional, in sensationally cinematic style, delivering perhaps his most intimate work to date.