David Ehrlich

Brizé ("Mademoiselle Chambon") is a humanist, not an economist, and his modest but moving new film is a welcome reminder that — for someone who can't afford to put food on the table or provide a proper education for their child— business is always personal.

Despite its new failures and familiar assortment of dud stunts (Wee-Man being launched onto a pile of metal is a pretty lame payoff to that musical chairs gag), Jackass Forever inevitably benefits from a stronger emotional undertow than any of the series’ previous films.

Ghost Town Anthology lacks the human touch it needs to satisfy beyond its symbolism, but if Côté’s 96-minute curio takes far too long to thaw, it’s never more spookily enthralling than in its final moments.

In the end, Denis Villeneuve was all too right: Your television isn’t big enough for the scope of his Dune, but that’s only because this lifeless spice opera is told on such a comically massive scale that a screen of any size would struggle to contain it.

A Woman’s Life is a very particular experience, told with consistency and without a whit of compromise. It’s not always exciting, but there’s something tremendously rewarding (and very sad) about the matter-of-factness of it all, the ceaseless indifference of time’s steady forward march.

“The Oldest Person in the World” remains an affecting watch — and potentially the first installment of a worthwhile series — because of how vulnerably Green interrogates why he cares so much about the subject at hand.

For all of its heady ideas, some of which it explores to greater effect than others, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles is most striking for how it illustrates that animation isn’t a mere subcategory of cinema. That movies have always been a unique medium for how they see reality and unreality as two overlapping roads towards the same truth.

It’s a story about the invisible fault lines of inequality, the moral compromises demanded by the American Dream, and the very practical ways in which remembering the past can be the only legitimate defense against the social forces that keep trying to repackage it as a vision of the future.

Jaw-dropping but often unfocused ... A rich film that nevertheless calls regular attention to any of the even richer (if perhaps less entertaining) films it might have been.

Here, the Norwegian’s filmmaker’s signature brand of existential dread (always coupled with and complicated by a youthful sense of becoming), is expressed through style more than action. This isn’t a movie where all that much happens, but every decision ripples with darkness.

Colette is a costume drama for people who have yet to figure out that they love costume dramas. It’s fleet enough after that first act, and the squeezed plotting of its second half ensures the story never gets too long in the tooth.

Disobedience is a beautiful, fraught, and emotionally nuanced drama that wrestles with hard questions about the tension between the life we’re born into and the one we choose for ourselves.

Ashe’s film gets a bit too flat for the big finale to arrive with the oomph that it should. And yet, as out of sync as you might get with the way that Sylvie’s Love riffs on its themes, you never want Ashe and his band to stop playing.

The story is so outlandish — and the film so dry — that it’s hard not to be impressed by the discipline White showed in refusing to have more fun with it.

Clear enough about what happened to be ambiguous about what it means, the film makes only one clean argument: Truth isn’t always stranger than fiction, but it’s often a hell of a lot sadder.

This is the role that he’s been rehearsing for his entire life, and Val is far more rewarding if you think about it not as an autobiographical documentary, but rather as a film about an actor finding a way to express more through his characters than his characters were ever able to express through him.

The gentle, lushly visualized and exasperatingly diffuse Miss Hokusai is a missed opportunity in many respects, but it certainly does a magnificent job of validating its own existence.

What this story reminds us isn’t that a woman named Sara Jane Moore was radicalized into action, but that history — for all of the larger than life sweep that word implies — is ultimately written on a level too personal for textbooks to ever understand.

While some of Bispuri’s scripting can be a bit too pointed for a story that traffics in such elemental textures (a brief flashback scene is particularly ill-advised), the film renders each of Vittoria’s mothers with such riveting and unvarnished empathy that you hardly even notice how their daughter is growing up before your eyes, stronger than the both of them.

The human imperative informs every aspect of After Tiller, resulting in an unexpectedly warm film.

Cats may have nine lives, but you only get one, and it’s too precious to waste on this drivel.

Carry-On doesn’t aspire to be too much more than good, trashy, yuletide fun, but it consistently over-delivers on that front in the process of telling a sweet little story about a guy who learns that a difficult career setback doesn’t have to result in a lifetime of surrender.

Dream Scenario is simply the best absurdist comedy of its kind since “Anomalisa” (the Kaufman connection being further cemented by a Cage performance that feels like it was born from superimposing both of his “Adaptation” characters on top of each other. …And also by a running joke about antkind).

“How does he do it?,” someone asks. Music by John Williams doesn’t have the slightest idea. This long and indulgent doc is content to let us bask in the mystery of it all, if only because it understands that people will be asking that same question for centuries to come.

Despite an occasional tendency to speed through its most compelling passages and flatten their mottled texture under the weight of Simon Russell’s emotionally instructive score, “One in a Million” is still a raw and absorbing epic about “what comes after” — one that naturally unfolds with all the joy, anguish, and unresolvable inner conflict of life itself.

aced at the speed of personal growth — it falls somewhere between slow cinema and visual ASMR — The Calming is true to its title in a way that may limit the size of its audience, but the extent to which Song confronts the anti-commerciality of her work (so much as this gentle movie “confronts” anything) provides a meta-textual tension unto itself. From its opening moments to its final shot, The Calming echoes Lin’s uncertainty about how to look at the world, and also see herself reflected in it.

Titled like a sequel, plotted like a remake, and shot with enough of its own singular verve to ensure that most people never think of it as either of those things, Spike Lee’s deliriously entertaining — if jarringly upbeat — Highest 2 Lowest modernizes the post-war anxieties of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” for the age of parasocial relationships.

The director’s palliative need for drama often snuffs out the very truths that Peaceful vows to restore to the process of dying. Where is the tedium of sickness? The discomfort of suffering? The banality of waiting for it to be over?