Dana Stevens

The Boy and the Heron may not have moved me emotionally as much as some of Miyazaki’s earlier classics, but it left me intellectually and aesthetically dazzled, and profoundly grateful for this late-life glimpse into the autobiography of one of film’s great living artists.

Cooper’s sophomore film far outshines the common run of contemporary biopics in its artful construction and attention to emotional nuance.

As it is now, Napoleon plays more like a hastily compiled highlight reel of a life than the full-fledged historical epic its director seems to have intended.

For all its cutting dialogue and its initially off-putting protagonist, The Holdovers is a cozy cardigan of a movie.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a cathedral of a movie, cavernously huge in ambition and scale, yet oddly intimate in its effect on the viewer.

The fact that an indie director like Gerwig chose, for her third film, to make a lavish blockbuster tied to a major studio’s IP has unsurprisingly caused some to dismiss her as a sellout. But watching her flex her filmmaking skills on this grand a scale, and succeed at creating sparklingly original summer entertainment, has me excited to see whatever Gerwig does next, big or small.

Despite its three-hour run time and the epic scale of its widescreen IMAX image, Oppenheimer is the most intimate movie the emotionally chilly Nolan has yet made.

Even at 163 minutes, it somehow moves with the no-nonsense briskness of a good airport thriller.

Though the action is often wittily imagined and choreographed, no one could confuse Mangold’s workmanlike direction with Spielberg’s kinetic instinct for how to place and move a camera. Still, Dial of Destiny clips along nicely: Even at 2 hours and 22 minutes, the pace seldom drags.

If Asteroid City had kept its focus more tightly on these two troubled families, it might have turned into the most emotionally truthful movie Anderson has yet made. Instead the story widens out to include a sprawling cast of less complex, if often amusing, secondary characters.

The main character of this movie expends enormous effort seeking affirmation that the words she spends her days trying to get down on paper matter. The movie’s writer-director, one of the most idiosyncratic and indispensable voices currently working in film comedy, needn’t worry about a thing.

Craig’s adaptation treats Margaret’s religious questioning with as much curiosity and respect as it does her budding sexuality.

To the film’s credit, nothing in Paint comes off as mean-spirited or patronizing, including the treatment of the town’s many less-than-sophisticated consumers of televised artmaking. But by the last half, the ambient niceness felt so pervasive and the film’s ultimate purpose so vague that, even when the performances and much of the dialogue remained sharp and funny, the movie around them seemed to dissolve into one of those happy little clouds.

To the disappointment of this once-enthusiastic ogler, Magic Mike’s Last Dance fails to capture the eponymous magic of the first two very different but both delightful movies.

Babylon is a defecating elephant of a movie: gigantic, often repulsive, but hard to look away from.

His passion is infectious and his enthusiasm for environmental causes commendable, but the movie’s metaphysical and sociological aspirations sometimes come off as cringe-inducingly similar to those that might be expressed by a white lady running a healing-crystal shop in a seaside town.

Fraser’s all-in commitment to playing Charlie—300-pound fatsuit and all—put me in mind of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Joker, an act of faith so complete it managed to be the only transcendent element of a thuddingly bad movie. But Fraser’s beautifully judged performance isn’t enough to save this abject wallow through a mire of maudlin clichés about trauma and redemption.

If there were an ensemble acting award at the Oscars, Glass Onion would be a lock for a nomination. The dialogue is fast-paced and verbally dense, and everyone in the cast volleys it back and forth with as much deftness as apparent pleasure.

Embedded in this seeming valentine to the movies is something pricklier, sadder, and smarter.

While it’s frequently moving and occasionally thrilling, the gears sometimes grind audibly on the shift in between.

Though it wears out its welcome in one dreary stretch midway through, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (which premieres on the free, ad-supported streaming service the Roku Channel on Friday) is an appropriately goofy tribute to its subject and co-creator: a movie parody about the life of a parodist.

As it moves toward an ambiguous and haunting finale, The Banshees of Inisherin has the fanciful yet gruesome quality of a folk tale or fairytale, a mood enhanced by Carter Burwell’s harp-and-flute-heavy score and Ben Davis’ painterly widescreen cinematography.

Cate Blanchett’s titanic, almost fanatically well-researched performance—she switches effortlessly between English and German with a soupçon of French thrown in, does her own piano playing, and conducts a real orchestra with utter verisimilitude—thrillingly embodies both Tár’s intense charisma and her monstrous skill at manipulation.

Once again, in trying to find our way past the icon to the woman underneath, we have only pushed Norma Jeane further away.

For the most part, Three Thousand Years of Longing reads not as an unintended allegory of contemporary race relations but as a thoughtful, melancholy, and sometimes mordantly funny celebration of the time-and-space-collapsing power of storytelling.

It’s Pitt’s wry presence, and his playful relationship to his own movie-star persona, that provides a still center amidst the CGI-smeared chaos and keeps this train from (metaphorically at least) going off the rails.

Sharp Stick is less a movie than a symptom, a tangle of would-be feminist ideas that, let us hope, needed to be gotten out of its creator’s system so she could get back to making something good

It’s such an original and idiosyncratic expression of its creator’s vision that sometimes the movie seems not to have yet made it all the way out of his head and onto the screen.