David Ehrlich

While The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar may be, in some respects, the most literal Dahl adaptation you could possibly imagine, the true author of this project is never in doubt.

El Conde isn’t big on subtlety (Lachman’s rich cinematography offers the film its only shades of gray), and so it feels like a missed opportunity that Larraín didn’t squeeze more juice from the all-too-relevant fact that deposing a fascist from power isn’t the same as defeating them.

A horror movie — even one as grounded and genre-adjacent as this — can’t hope to survive if it doesn’t even feel believable on its own fantastical terms.

The Reyes family is a fun group, and “Blue Beetle” is at its best whenever it lets them lead the way.

Sometimes, this peculiarly amusing film argues in its own special way, coming face-to-face with the weirdness that life throws your way can be the most important step towards learning how to live with it.

If you’re going to make an R-rated horror wank about Dracula slurping throats with a smile on his face, make sure that the rest of the movie doesn’t suck as hard as he does.

This visceral portrait of life during wartime is at its most harrowing and unshakeable when it confronts the heightened reality of its conceit with the apathetic naturalism of its drama.

This decades-spanning drama — a lyrical and probing adaptation of David Chariandy’s novel about two siblings coming of age under the care of their Trinadadian single mother in the suburbs of Toronto — is so unstuck in time and shot through with raw emotion that its clunkier moments tend to function like tender maps back to the heart of the matter.

No movie has so literally reduced basketball to “just a game,” and no movie this side of “Hoop Dreams” has so ecstatically conveyed why it’s also so much more than that.

This veritable “Eat, Pray, Hike” leaves no trace of originality or dramatic consequence. The advantages it has over the likes of “We Wish You a Married Christmas” and “Royally Ever After” are twofold: A likable cast, and dignified source material.

The material simply isn’t strong or self-interested enough to support a cast as rich as the one Simien assembles here, a fact made all the more obvious by the director’s natural facility for staging ensemble comedy in the face of mortal danger.

It’s only towards the very end, when the film’s satire and surrealism pull apart from each other like a party cracker, that the tension brewing in Orson’s department becomes compelling enough to justify the busywork of creating it.

Despite building their adaptation around the cyclical predictability of American capitalism, Gore and Kulash can’t help but twist history’s biggest toy craze into a hollow and half-invented corporate fantasy about three women who bought low, sold high, and reinvested all the profits in themselves. If only it were that easy.

Like “The Prestige” or “Interstellar” before it, “Oppenheimer” is a movie about the curse of being an emotional creature in a mathematical world. The difference here isn’t just the unparalleled scale of this movie’s tragedy, but also the unfamiliar sensation that Nolan himself is no less human than his characters.

This trite Irish trifle about a girls trip to Lourdes is so chalky and underbaked that its all-star cast (Laura Linney! Kathy Bates! Stephen Rea!) is left no choice but to chew on the scenery.

Despite trafficking in a wide array of Sundance tropes — from its modest but ethereal monochrome cinematography by DP Laura Valladao, to Mahmood Schricker’s Sqürl-adjacent guitar score — Fremont is always more delicate than it is precious and mercifully never quite as cute as it sounds.

A furious yet resiliently hopeful documentary about white America’s long and ongoing history of colonizing the Očeti Šakówin (along with the rest of this land’s indigenous people), Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli’s vital Lakota Nation vs. United States doesn’t waste any of its 121 minutes, but it also boasts a number of moments that effectively squeeze the film’s entire perspective into a single unforgettable image.

Spread thin between that father-son drama and the jolts intended to galvanize it, Wilson’s creaky debut underdelivers on both.

Like so much of The Out-Laws, Brosnan and Barkin are both a little better than they need to be, and also a lot better than their material demands.

Ridiculous from the start but also strangely fresh for yet another 21st century tentpole about a rogue A.I., “Dead Reckoning Part One” may not be the best movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — there’s no topping the raw adrenaline rush of “Fallout,” and McQuarrie is smart enough not to try — but this extravagantly entertaining Dolby soap opera nails what the “Mission: Impossible” franchise does best: Weaponizing artifice and illusion in order to fight for a world that’s still worth believing in.

"The Book of Solutions" is — first and foremost — a high-energy ode to the joys of being possessed by a creative spirit, and the pleasure that Gondry takes in telling a plot-light story that’s driven by pure invention is both palpable and contagious.

O’Connor’s exquisite performance seems to channel Harry Dean Stanton’s haunted turn in “Paris, Texas”; less wraith-like in its physicality, but similarly intangible, like a man being played by his own shadow.

An 81-minute film that’s as crisp and bittersweet as a late autumn breeze, Kaurismäki’s latest might amount to little more than a bauble in the end, but it offers a stirring reminder — both with its story, and through the experience of watching it — that life can only be so bleak so long as you can still go to the movies and escape it for a little while.

It’s always been hard not to admire Hausner’s audacity, but this time around the boldness of her storytelling finally spills into trollish provocation.

If all of Anderson’s movies are sustained by the tension between order and chaos, uncertainty and doubt, “Asteroid City” is the first that takes that tension as its subject, often expressing it through the friction created by rubbing together its various levels of non-reality.

This is a fun — and sometimes very funny — movie that is virtually impossible to make fun of in return, and at the end of the day, that might be the only metric of success that matters to it.

While The Delinquents was pointedly made to provoke active viewing and push back against the algorithmic storytelling that has choked the life out of modern cinema, its airiness and emergent sense of romance make it a delightful place to get lost for a while.

This raw and lingeringly sensitive film resonates more strongly when it’s lost in the ice maze than when it’s tracing its steps back to the entrance. The Breaking Ice sticks with you because it doesn’t lead its characters out of the maze, it just melts down the walls between them.