David Edelstein

Serenity isn’t just meant to surprise you — which it will — but to give you an emotional wallop — which it may or may not. It didn’t work for me: I was too hung up on the fanciness (and, in truth, ridiculousness) of the final half-hour to feel everything Knight wanted me to feel.

So-so quasi-thriller.

If Shyamalan is an original, his originality is in draining the life out of pop archetypes, twerpily annotating them, and presenting it all as a gift from on high.

Moderately entertaining, immoderately splattery spaghetti Western.

The farcical revelations — with their attendant puking and pounding on bathroom doors — work better than the grimly sincere ones. But only one bit goes clunk — the rest is deftly staged and acted.

The movie is phenomenally well made and the three actors who fall apart on our watch suffer magnificently.

Maybe my assessment is colored by the dud ending, since the journey to its criminally unsatisfying final scenes is tantalizingly dreamlike and unnerving.

Rust Creek lets you exhale just a bit. It’s tight without being punishing, and its humor takes you happily by surprise. In this sort of film, you’re on guard for pop-up scares and sudden spasms of gore, not for moments of blessed connection. The humanism feels positively radical.

As a director, Coen commits comedy’s most cardinal sin: He gets between us and the performers.

The defense concedes that the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex hits its marks with the subtlety of a legal brief. But that’s not fatal.

As impersonated by Bale, Cheney the Edifice is too impregnable for McKay to make it — psychologically speaking — past the moat, but the movie does have a firm dramatic arc.

A modest but reasonably suspenseful and abidingly eerie portrait of the aged white American male trying vainly to forestall rejection and irrelevance.

Mary Poppins Returns is a work of painstaking re-creation, and it’s full of nice touches. But it’s a bit of a dud.

What emerges is a portrait of a man whose fall was precipitous but whose sensibility and techniques outlive him and continue to evolve. This is the acid test for a good journalistic documentary: No matter how far back it reaches, Divide and Conquer always feels as if it’s in the present tense.

It’s a good idea done well until the last 20 minutes, when the leap from a realistic addiction drama to a hair’s-breadth Hollywood rescue movie is too jarring to ignore.

Part of the movie’s fun — and it is fun, once you adjust to its uninsistent rhythms — is how it forces you to share Lazarro’s go-along-to-get-along ebullience.

Though mostly twaddle as history, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite is wonderful, nasty fun, a period drama (wigs, breeches, beauty spots) that holds the screen with gnashing teeth and slashing nails.

I’m not a fan of Schnabel’s paintings, but I think he’s a born film painter, and even if At Eternity’s Gate doesn’t reliably cross the blood-brain barrier, his frames are like no one else’s. (His cinematographer is Benoît Delhomme.)

On paper it sounds cringeworthy, but much of it is great fun. Mortensen is cartoonish in the most marvelous way.

Outlaw King has a wild card — a really wild card — in Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Lord of Douglas, whose family the English humiliated. He’s so wild that as soon as he reconquers his castle, he burns it to the ground for spite. In battle, he screams in exaltation, and just when you wonder how he’ll top that, he screams again, even louder, now drenched — sopped — in gore. That you won’t get to see that in IMAX is a war crime.

The best thing about the film The Front Runner is that it gives Gary Hart, the Colorado senator and 1984 and ’88 presidential candidate, a measure of dignity, and today’s audiences a historical context in which to view his missteps.

Lucas Hedges has a difficult job — to portray a teenager whose best option is to reveal nothing of himself. The key is to make that lack of “reveal” an active rather than passive process, and Hedges does it with remarkable intelligence. His indecision is alive and moving.

The Coens’ newest Western, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, might be their bleakest work of all, and one of their richest.

If you’re immune to Malek, there’s no hope for you. The actor might not be as handsome as Mercury and might not do much actual singing (it’s all Freddie), but he’s nearly as magnetic, and he makes you believe that that voice is coming out of that body — an amazing feat.

Don't dig too deep into The Other Side of the Wind: It's largely surface. But what a surface. And what a chest of toys for a man who never lost his childlike delight in playing with the medium.

An interesting take. The problem is that Guadagnino can’t cast a decent spell.

A test of an actor is playing someone who’s split in so many ways that he moves forward while looking backwards and vice versa, and Chalamet is already a master.

Bad Times at the El Royale isn’t an event. But I was never too bored.