David Edelstein

James Gray’s space opera Ad Astra is so eerily, transfixingly beautiful that I want to purge from my mind its resolution.

The Goldfinch is too artful to deserve that kind of rejection, but too arty to keep you from saying, “What did I just see?”

Bloody hell, the Brits do low-key, paranoid procedural dramas like Official Secrets well, with a pervading chill and no flash: The crispness cuts like a knife.

On balance, I admire the hell out of Collaizo for choosing to tell a more emotionally convoluted story, even if it sometimes kills the momentum.

It’s a great, expansive, deeply humanist work, angry but empathetic to its core. It gestures toward the end of the working world we know — and to the rise of the machines.

He’s a deceptively crafty director (he fakes naturalism beautifully in movies like "Dazed and Confused," "Before Sunrise," and "Boyhood"), but he can’t find a suitable form for Maria Semple’s patchwork best seller about a misanthropic, malcontented ex-architect named Bernadette.

None of the characters has a true home. Comedies end with weddings, with order replacing chaos, but After the Wedding is not a comedy and weddings don’t fool anyone.

If, like so many conspiracy-mongers, Brügger is in this to make his name, whatever the social consequences, his comeuppance should be swift. But I want to believe that this isn’t a stunt and that his first-person meta nonsense — his desire to call attention to his floundering — is a sign of honesty, not obscurantism.

It’s a devastating film, almost too terrible to contemplate.

In the end, you’re left with a movie that doesn’t quite jell but expands in the mind. It’s an excellent Book Club movie — it demands to be discussed, debated, embraced, or (perhaps) rejected.

It’s constructed like a meathead melodrama — though with odd, last-act dissonances that might reflect Kent’s ambivalence.

On its own terms, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a farrago of genius.

For Sama doesn’t feel like raw footage — it has been carefully shaped, with a bit of movie-­ish suspense during the final hours, when the last of the families in East Aleppo were told they could surrender to the regime but were fired on anyway. The ending is a little fancy for my taste — a montage of the good times and an overhead shot of Waad and her baby walking through the rubble.

If Luz had been a play, I’d probably have walked out halfway through, but as a film I found it eerie enough to stay rooted.

The only surprise is the level of violence — not just beyond "The Karate Kid" but beyond "Fight Club." The problem with that strategy is that unless you’re knocked out, you’re just grossed out and eager to go. You practice the art of self-defense against the movie.

The actors make the ordinary extraordinary — they give these characters the stature that eludes most superheroes.

My ideal Leonard Cohen documentary would contain another hour’s worth of concert footage and be screened outdoors on the island of Hydra. Otherwise, this is as full a filmed portrait of the man and his muse as you could ever hope to see.

The second half of Spider-Man: Far from Home is a single, scary, brilliantly sustained climax in which what’s real seems just as improbable as what isn’t.

Curtis isn’t the director of Yesterday; Danny Boyle has been brought in to lend his shallow virtuosity. But fluid transitions don’t make the movie less clunky. Patel has an appealing presence and a lovely, McCartney-­like tenor, but the musical numbers leave an odd taste.

The final sequence dodges (or elides) many of the movie’s central logistical dilemmas, but the song (“Glasgow,” written by Mary Steenburgen, Caitlyn Smith, and Kate York) and the performance are so rousing it almost doesn’t matter. Like the best country music, the movie finds its own kind of truth.

The most ambitious horror blurs the line between the psychological and the mythic, between ordinary human emotions and symbol-laden Blakean nightmares, and Aster is very ambitious and very blurry.

It’s so aggressively puerile and phallocentric (big swinging dicks, big guns) it could be taken as a parody of a puerile, phallocentric action comedy — a hotfoot to feminists and girly-men. That’s a distinction without a difference, though, since either way it stinks to heaven.

It’s painful to report that Jarmusch’s deadpan is in the rigor mortis stage in The Dead Don’t Die. His own creative ferment isn’t happening this time — the acid cynicism has killed the yeast — and the actors seem unsure whether to commit to the material when their director plainly hasn’t.

Most of all, De Palma proves that greatest suspense (and horror) come from helplessness, a sense of impotence.

Like most good superhero movies, Dark Phoenix operates on two levels, comic-book fantastical and psychological. Like most not-so-good ones, it doesn’t do justice to either aspect. The results here are middling, but the director, Simon Kinberg, throws a lot of ideas at you. It’s not boring.

In common with most recovery stories, Rocketman boils down to a fat lump of self-pity, but the music does leaven things.

This thing is an unholy mess.

Most of Brightburn belabors the obvious.