Charles Bramesco

While Andersson has continued in his signature style for this coda, erecting pallid beige-and-grey backlot dioramas with a painterly eye for crowded composition, he repurposes the technique toward a newfound elegiac, gentle register.

It’s the kind of seemingly effortless success that makes producing a good superhero movie look easy: find a likable hero and a colorful villain, hire someone who knows how to write a punch line, and for Stan Lee’s sake, keep it fun.

Even if the dry wit and cherrypickable allusions may be absent, the technical virtuosity on display marks this as the work of a master. Visceral, haunted, and severe, Coen’s vision coaxes out not just the intensity in the play – every “gritty” take has done this, from Roman Polanski to Justin Kurzel – but in its older renderings.

Though the film starts and finishes with swaggering demonstrations of politicized revolt, the rest lapses into the conventions of a genre fatally attached to them.

Just because something’s make-believe, whether a creative rendering or the quotidian detail of a marriage, that doesn’t mean it’s any less real. With his masterly manipulation of tone and perspective, Haynes ensures that we can feel that much even as the characters can’t bear to accept it.

David Lowery’s complex, visually sumptuous and uncommercial tale of Arthurian legend revels in upending expectations.

The script’s attempts at wisdom amount to little more than dime-store platitudes, and the internecine turmoil of the Arashikage clan never comes close to anything like emotional heft.

Business as usual has largely resumed in Wuhan, but Wang’s film contends that that’s just the problem. The same apparatuses of messaging and censorship are still in operation, ensuring that the full extent of the malfeasance may never be fully known

Though Honeyland is also about what it’s about; in addition to underscoring another inconvenient truth with planetary stakes, the film offers tender, patient portraiture to a woman wholly dedicated to her calling. The melding of the political with the personal has seldom involved so many stingers to the face.

Ultimately, it’s Sweeney’s show, and she excels in locating small crannies of tacit detail within these offhanded lines.

With a firm handle on tone, Park skirts the pitfalls of bad taste one might expect from a film that uses mass violence as a narrative device for a coming-of-age plot.

Williams and Uzeyman work in a mode of rich ideas and vibes, both so plentiful that the narrative obliqueness feels less alienating and more like an inviting challenge. It earns the attention it demands.

The tone never defines the stakes in such grave terms, but that’s the key to the potency of Mills’ cinema: life’s pivotal turns come in idle moments, from inconspicuous sources. All it takes is the willingness to listen.

The genre maestro has his audience in good hands, “good” in this instance meaning both “skilled, capable, expert” and “decent, ethically sound.” He’s assembled a dazzling contraption that, if twisted in just the right way, pops open to reveal a nugget of wisdom crystallized by the cathartic final shot: we only really own what we earn.

Marder believes devoutly in the power of actors and acting, preferring to get out of the way and let them show their stuff. Ahmed returns the favor by delivering career-best work by a wide margin.

Brunner puts his ability to invest anything and everything with a malevolent charge to chillingly effective use.

The evasive, guarded acting from the main players can only do so much to elevate the paltry material Nikou gives them to work with. A long, fitfully amusing walk down a short road.

However dazzling the vortexes this film shoots us through at supersonic speed may be, they still deposit us somewhere we’ve been before.

A scattered but likable jumble, the film has a thoughtful manner more than it has actual thoughts, much like the trio of quasi-intellectuals joining forces with Markus.

Training its crosshair on the ingrained prejudice of the military and the question of how well-meaning white allies can best support its undoing, the film compensates for relatively middling action set pieces with a stolid maturity.

The good news is that the director’s ambitions, no matter how inadvisable, have attracted a strong cast and occasioned some of their best work.

With its unabashed focus on bodies, luring us in with their nudity before hacking them into tiny pieces, the back-to-basics slasher X arrives as a bold rebuke to all things staid and dignified.

Adroit casting, writing, editing, performing and costuming shade the outline of an affair to a finely sharpened emotional realism, the cycles of fighting and reconciling we’ve all seen before regaining in rawness as if we’re now the ones living through it.

All said, there are less educational ways to raise your blood pressure for two hours, and the masochistic Twitter-refreshers nourishing themselves with a steady drip of maddening headlines will have plenty to fume over. Starting with the sniggering title, this torturous rehashing of yesterday’s history all seems to be for them.

Campbell’s fearlessness, in both her abrasion and the fragile humanity behind her chaos, helps strike this delicate balance.

Jackman shines, teasing us with suggestions of just how deep his performance runs.

This is Strickland’s grand act of prestidigitation; he coaxes out something like poignancy from the peculiar, just as he conjures the visceral and unknowable from ordinary groceries.

The by-any-means-necessary bit barrage crams sight gags into the corners of frames, the credits, the infinitesimal space within edits. In a film that nobly aspires to everything being funny at all times, anything can be, the chief benefit of director Akiva Schaffer’s attention to and appreciation for the elements of cinematic form. You’ve got to be smart to be this stupid.

The eventual reveal of the who and the why provides satisfying resolution, though the reward feels petty in comparison to the film’s freestanding pleasures: the tremulous discovery of love, the crystalline peace of unsupervised play, and above all else, the transportive score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, a masterwork within a minor work.

Hamer and Gault won the day in a hail of submachine fire, but even their hagiography can’t hide that they’re history’s losers.

Frammartino handles the collision between a vanishing then and the encroaching now with a light touch, mournful yet not quite damning.

Those who appreciated the original for its brutal, sinewy agility have another thing coming: a lumbering, stultifying gargantua of a film willing to kill everything except its darlings.

After The Ball commits its most garish faux pas in rooting its plot in the thorny politics of high fashion, despite an apparent lack of any understanding of how the business works.

Allergic to the ponderous brand of overdetermined ‘metaphorror’ currently in vogue, Cregger possesses a showman’s instincts, his energies primarily invested in pound-for-pound entertainment value. Maybe that’s why the subject at hand feels so perfunctory, the broad feminist stance filling out the vacant space in otherwise unrelated macro- and micro-scaled tricks of structuring.

With an achievement of this calibre it’s hard to resist hyperbole: High Life contains the single greatest one-person sex scene in the history of cinema.

Its entwined torrents of pain and pleasure chart the boundaries of sensation in a buttoned-up age, and allow us back in the present to be scandalized by its raw, visceral (in the definitional, from-the-guts sense) hungers as if for the very first time.

The fundamental predictability of Before I Disappear’s main plot is just one of the missteps that betray Christensen’s inexperience.

Everyone’s reaching for a system of support. In most cases, allowed by Koreeda with admirable generosity, they can latch on to one another.

An increasingly loud world may have made the quiet truths of "Mrs. Miniver" seem small - tune out the noise and hear what this film is saying. It's a roadmap for how dignity and freedom can survive.

Rankin’s ambitious thesis on how idiocy, horny neuroses, and pure chance come to sculpt the geopolitical narrative never gets bogged down by the social-studies minutia. He throws one dazzling diversion after another at his audience.

With his work now migrating online and his jerry-rigged methods increasingly outsourced to post-production effects, Jeunet can’t avoid the impending digitization of cinema, nor life. Still, he’s not going down without landing a few good fingers to the ribs first.

Ocelot’s joyous mashup is a work of uncommonly vivid imagination, sharing space with Yellow Submarine, Fantastic Planet, and The Triplets Of Belleville in the omnivorous grade-schooler’s alt-canon.

Farahani’s elegiac documentary takes far more interest in Mohassess the man than Mohassess the artist.

Heineman’s thesis that because leaving has gone so poorly, staying would’ve necessarily been better is incorrect at best, and disingenuous at worst. He wants to think structurally, aware that America can and does flatten other nations beneath our clumsy footfalls. He just can’t — or won’t — see the whole structure out of apparent fear that it’ll be too unflattering for all involved, including him, the army’s useful launderer of their image-sanitizing talking points.

Old Fashioned fails in more banal ways, too. It’s a flatly predictable sort of romance; numerous leaves are turned over, both figuratively and literally. The film’s predilection for screamingly obvious symbols gets old fast.

We’re implored to never forget through a format that makes particulars prohibitively hard to remember.

The overstuffed, better-keep-up narrative suits the film’s purposes, occupying audience attentions to leave them unprepared for the nimble writing’s assorted baits and switches.

Singer aims for the bleak, gritty texture standard to the genre, and winds up closer to the result of an anonymous recommendation generated by the algorithmic tags of “Bleak, Gritty.”

He’s not quite deconstructing the gangster picture, but he succeeds in draining all its allure.

Like McCall, [Washington] knows his tools, an arsenal not of guns and blades but of withering stares and crumpled smiles. It’s almost enough to outshine everything else.

Kurzel’s prismatic view of Kelly’s life and times goes to gnarlier and more vivid places than superficially similar period pieces.

Scott and Poo have seized on one substantive idea in their portraiture of a singular personality reduced to a caricature of himself by posterity and duly reveal the sensitive artiste who always aspired to more than “Top Gun.” If only they did so with less straightforwardness and more authorial license.

Too well-schooled in the social physics of the internet to come off as a scold against it, writer-director Kristoffer Borgli dexterously skewers a callous culture that cultivates, digests, and disposes of its novelty acts with the blazing-fast speed of a good WiFi connection.

Never lacking in earnestness or vigor, she nonetheless teeters over the lines separating introspection from navel-gazing and the raw from the simply underdone.

This prodigal son’s reappearance ignites a rivalry a little Biblical and a little Shakespearean, though their macho melodrama hews most closely to the flavor of screenwriterly contrivance.

For all the amazement at Ball’s tireless hustle and explosive originality, there’s a terminal lack of both in this monument to her memory.

A consistently funny yet narratively undercooked coming-of-age story.

The character dynamics are still as rich as when Sherriff first realised them, and C Company’s supporting servicemen add a few complementary hues to this portrait of militarised despair.... And yet Dibb’s direction doesn’t leave the actors enough room to breathe.

Moselle is at her most astute when concentrating on the fragile social dynamics that govern the tribes adolescents divide themselves into for survival’s sake.

Western media has trained us to brace for the worst in works engaging with the fanatical corners of Islam, and so the ground-level sobriety in Saleh’s treatment lands as a blessing all its own.

The thread connecting the finest shorts — Panahi, Poitras, and Joe — is adaptation, the willingness to alter form to match the challenge at hand. Those able to refit their already-developed technique to a new set of standards don’t just get the best results. In their undaunted, humble determination to continue, they embody the present zeitgeist with more fidelity than a thousand post-mortems.

Everything on the menu of The Menu looks good enough, but once its moldy tirade against the one percent has been fully dished out, it’s plain to see there’s not a whole lot of meat on the bone here.

The lackluster Little Fish banks on the automatic pathos of its subject matter, unaware that such delicate material actually requires greater skill and finesse to pull off, now more than ever. Rather than imbuing this unintended commentary with a cathartic charge, its proximity to reality accentuates the air of inauthenticity.

To fully understand Cohn, to see how the larger-than-life force shaping the latter half of the 20th century came to mold the 21st as well, requires a more penetrating approach than Tyrnauer’s easily digested, skin-deep survey.

For all the dicks of varying turgidity on proud display, it’s the intimations of true insecurities that leave these characters most nakedly exposed.

This whoopie cushion of a film raises the concept of the lowest common denominator up to the highest highs of esoteric tastes and in doing so, gets closer to the essence of artistry than all of its self-important, straight-faced forebears.

Stanley ratchets up the off-kilter humor while playing down the deep melancholy present in the short story’s original text. This observation could be seen as a knock on the director’s approach, but for audiences going in with zero expectations beyond a good time, the interlaced humor feels like nothing more than playing to Cage’s unique strengths.

Having set out to shock and ultimately shatter his audience, a film-maker unwilling or incapable of hitting the tonal brakes succeeds in his mission, only to compromise a deeper dramatic power along the way.

Yoon executes all the classic double-agent set pieces with finesse, and those enamoured of the genre will appreciate a change of setting.

Silver threatens to tease out some compelling emotional dimensions from Robbie and Nina, but stops just short of profundity. Uncertain Terms has no problem amounting to the sum total of its markedly basic component parts.

For all its attempts to build itself into something more substantive, it’s still a day at the theme park.

Slipping into insanity right alongside its protagonist, Smile is an uncommonly sharp movie deviously disguising itself as more of the same. Lowering our defences with the appearance of the commonplace may be its most wicked move of all.

Hall’s marching in lockstep with a lengthy platoon of directors who have already blazed this same path through enemy territory. And though he’s got some upstanding troops at his disposal, his plan of attack lacks that crucial unexpected element that can take an opposing battalion – or an audience – off guard.

Bryan’s done his homework, mapping out an elaborate network of past wrongdoings with news clippings and TV footage. If the just deserts that this film demands ever come to pass, it will almost certainly be the most copiously photographed treason in a long and illustrious American tradition.

Just as [Cronenberg’s] characters can live in a suspended state of rot, he can thrive within a world and culture in its death throes. In his reenergized perspectives on degeneration, he’s created one last safe haven for his fellow degenerates.

We may never fully know who Brian Wilson is, but in his resistance of that knowing, we gain clarity on a crucial plank of his latter-day persona.

Wigon’s sleek, seductive drama — as contained and actor-driven as a stage play, though shot so expressively that it could only be cinema — breaks down this pairing just to build it back up from scratch, testing the viability of a connection rooted in guarded performance as it crawls on all fours toward a more open, authentic intimacy.

Whannell’s finite reserves of creativity have been meted out in an imbalance, going all in on world-building while giving the fight choreography and the cinematography listlessly documenting it the short shrift.

The double character piece excels most when Neugebauer does her thing and facilitates her actors. Together, they build a pair of utterly real people, nonetheless confined to a dramatic universe more prone to contrivance. But the pleasures of the former generally outweigh the irksomeness of the latter, with Lawrence and costar Brian Tyree Henry joined in as a super-generator of onscreen magnetism.

Between the known metatext and Affleck’s bone-deep commitment, this moving central performance largely purges the film of its high potential for the maudlin.

It’s less heartwarming than heart-microwaving.

When you’re this good, the weakest entry in your filmography can still be largely inoffensive, far from fiasco territory. Even so, there’s only one person doing it like Claire Denis, and now we must wait even longer to be taken once more to the heights of insight, emotion, and style only she can reach.

There’s a system incompatibility error with the dominant bestie metaphor that leaves the film’s stance on Big Gizmo garbled.

For cinephiles, this will be effective propaganda in service of a belief they already hold, a reaffirmation of their purist convictions from a simpatico mind. ... [But it] can sometimes slip into slightness, as Ferrara pads an already slim run time.

Both stars were evidently tempted by the promise of a “meaty role,” taking that concept to mean one that entails a lot of acting instead of complex acting. As the intrigue builds, both characters lose the multi-dimensionality that should be growing deeper and richer, reduced from individuals working within a system they must also oppose to a more basic cat-and-mouse dynamic.

With a mix of righteous anger and abiding serenity, Thornton terraforms the Wild West of his home nation into a spiritually parched landscape.

Luhrmann sees the chief utility of Elvis (or “Booby,” as his loved ones called him) as a pedestal for his everything-all-the-time maximalism, the King of Rock and Roll’s taste for excess in harmony with the Aussie auteur’s desire to shove shock-and-awe cinematic effect down his viewers’ throats until we choke to death on whip zooms.

In the past, Östlund has shown a deft facility in sending up meaty topics, applying granular attention to male ego in “Force Majeure” and art-world pretensions with “The Square.” Here, however, he stoops to the broadness ascribed to his work by its harshest critics, now more parody of himself than parodist.

There’s something curious and pure about the way Leone disassembles bodies, like a child breaking open an old VCR not to see how it works, but to survey and play with the complicated stuff inside.

Roth thinks in hooks and punchlines, which keeps the copious slayings inventive and gratifying while also enlivening the connective tissue between them.

[A] solid, well-executed testament to the horrors of the great outdoors.

The new biopic Young Woman and the Sea presents Eberle’s life as a broadly inspiring parable of female striving and triumph, its plot points readily mapped onto any struggle to break into a boys’ club.

Zimny could have mined some more intimate profundity from Stallone’s determined political fence-sitting, the reluctance of a born entertainer to alienate any faction of his fandom with vocal partisanship.

A mite repetitive at nearly two hours, it’s still an edifying intermediate-level study compressing academic insight into personal reflection, and vice versa.

Polarizing yet undeniably fascinating, the bait-and-switch horror film lures its viewer into a false sense of terrified security before pouncing in an anything-goes frenzy, and Evans’s latest is a prime specimen.

Carnahan’s formal proficiency makes for a more sharpened and accomplished piece of work than many modern counterparts attempting to draw from the same well of cheap-o homage. That sense of precision doesn’t detract from the down-and-dirty fun, either; everyone on screen appears to be having the time of their lives gnawing on the rare slab of beef they’ve been thrown.

This time, his journey doesn’t send him to the ends of experience. Instead, he goes on a smug odyssey of know-it-all-ism that yields a scant few factoids we didn’t already learn from his first film.

In the leading role as the queen of soul, Jennifer Hudson comports herself as well as could be hoped considering the material she’s been given, which demands that she reinvigorate a rote character arc with her own passions.