David Ehrlich

Jan Hřebejk’s The Teacher is a sardonic, richly seriocomic morality play that uses a delicate touch to explore why communism never seems to work out in the long run.

Semans’ film stands out for how purposefully it seems to walk the line between schlocky crap and serious cinema.

There’s no denying that the domestic scenes of Free Solo are more powerful because you appreciate the madness of what Honnold is trying to do, and the climbing scenes are more powerful because you appreciate the full extent of what he’s risking to do it.

It’s undeniably affirming to watch someone risk it all in order to embrace who they really are, even if that’s not who the world said they should want to be. It’s been one hell of a journey, but David Arquette has finally found the role of a lifetime.

An agile, vicious piece of work that’s anchored by extraordinary performances from Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn, Una maintains its grip even when swinging a bit too hard for the fences.

The most striking moments that Ataei and Keshavarz create here are the ones in which their characters are forced to negotiate between self-expression and self-preservation rather than choose between them.

The film misses the core emotional charge of “A Separation” despite a similar eagerness to wade into the weeds of Iranian civil law, but what it lacks in brute force sentiment it makes up for in the Socratic purity of its structure and the childlike simplicity of its central question: What’s the difference between doing a good deed and not doing a bad one?

The documentary lets its subject’s weathered charisma do most of the hard work here — Scorsese and Tedeschi love him too much to beg for your attention — and yet it weaves in enough context to convince even the biggest New York Dolls neophytes of the band’s legacy. Even longtime fans might be struck by the contrast between the breeziness of the film’s tone and the weight of its history.

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.

I wish we got to see more of the big show at the end of the movie, but that’s almost beside the point — all that matters is that, somehow, someway, it goes on.

It’s easy to imagine how a version of this film might have descended into vaguely connected sketches (and still would have been one of the funniest pure comedies in forever despite its shapelessness), but there’s a clear and rewarding intentionality to DeYoung’s plotting, and it pays off with a finale that — better than almost any scene before it — perfectly threads the needle between all of the movie’s competing energies.

Pansy’s general distaste for humanity would make Mr. Burns seem big-hearted by comparison, but Leigh’s faith in the root humanity of Jean-Baptiste’s performance — and in the hurt that guides it through even the broadest moments of humor — allows him to indulge in a variety of laugh-out-loud setpieces without any risk of losing Pansy to caricature.

Modest and casual until the exact moment when the film’s master plan suddenly clicks into place like the hammer of a gun transforming a neutral tool into a deadly weapon, “Good One” is the kind of movie that tightens its complete lack of tension into a knot in the pit of your stomach.

However disappointing it might be that Bad Education is too delicate (and true) to really go wild and let Finley indulge in the flamboyance that made “Thoroughbreds” such a wicked treat, this is a young director who can see the whole chess game 20 moves in advance.

Splitting the difference between silent cinema slapstick and the cartoon roguishness of Benny Hill, this is still the kind of old-fashioned, all-ages entertainment that Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.

A thoughtful, fast-paced, and immaculately acted procedural that unfolds with the urgency of a newspaper deadline, By the Grace of God zips through the facts of this horrid case, while also shaping them into a lens through which to examine the uneasy relationships between mercy and justice — between faith and the flawed institution that exists to preserve it.

Cuba and the Cameraman, while essentially a greatest hits collection for Alpert’s career, never feels recycled. It also never feels Frankensteined together.

Dare to peek under the scales of this wholly original and ominously enchanting nightmare, and you’ll find a simple story about the things that society forces a girl to give up if she wants to be part of our world.

Abrupt to a fault but still unexpectedly moving, their perpendicular journeys back to a place of mutual appreciation ring true enough in a time when narcissism can bring joy to people around the planet, and altruism isn’t enough to guarantee a connection with your own kids.

Robbie, for her part, has never been better. Making the most of her first leading role since Z for Zachariah, she does a brilliant job of skating along the thin line that runs between glory and the gutter. Sympathetic but not too sympathetic, her performance is all that allows the film to maintain its tenuous hold over its queasy tragicomedy.

If you have even the slightest emotional connection to Springsteen’s music — if you’ve ever found salvation in a rock song, or desperately wished that you could change your clothes, your hair, your face — this giddy steamroller of a movie is going to flatten you whether you like it or not.

Tragic news for anyone who’s sick of superhero movies: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse completely reinvigorates the genre, reaffirms why it’s resonating with a diverse modern audience that’s desperate to fight the power, and reiterates to us how these hyper-popular spandex myths are able to reinvent themselves on the fly whenever things get stale.

There may be individual shots in this movie that cost more than the director’s entire pre-existing output, but make no mistake: This is a David Lowery movie — a movie imbued with the same tactile nature and uniquely American flair for myth-making that characterized his Sundance breakthrough, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.”

Yes, life can only be understood backwards, but Memoir of a Snail makes a sweetly compelling case that we’ll see the beauty in it one day — such a sweetly compelling case, in fact, that you might just start looking for it now

In focusing less on the happiness we imagine for other people than on the happiness we get to share with them instead, it finds enough fleeting joy to make being alive feel like its own eternal reward.

In the end, Jones’ performance is even more lifelike than I feared — a tortured and astonishingly nuanced rendering of a childlike creature whose id could only be tempered by love for so long before it chose violence instead. And it should go without saying that Kurzel’s fatalistic storytelling so pungently exhumes the pain that led up to that awful day in April 1996 that you can smell the death coming several hours in advance.