David Ehrlich

The moments when 100 Yards lands its blows are exhilarating in a way that makes the movie feel miles removed from most of its competition.

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.

On its own, Paddington in Peru is a fun if forgettable matinee for the whole family to enjoy, but — like its hero and its villain alike — the movie belongs to a tradition that it implores us to cherish like an heirloom, and it would be a direct contradiction of its story to orphan it from the greater context of its creation.

“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.

It’s not that Absolution is any worse than the awful likes of “Retribution” (quite the opposite), but this seedy crime saga makes it uniquely clear that Neeson’s special set of skills have taken him as far as they can.

Netto and Schindler are less interested in pulpy sadism than they are in pure suspense.

Despite the film’s best efforts to melt its characters into the vast sludge of superhero cinema, the union between Eddie and Venom is simply too pure to be diluted down to nothing. Thanks to Hardy, even the least of the movies in this franchise is definitely something, and it’s something that its genre may not be able to survive without.

The film is determined to prove that people can meaningfully interact with the world in any number of ways, now more than ever, and it accomplishes that goal with real clarity and rare emotional force (the last shot is the kind of gut-punch that hurts so good).

Nothing about it feels the least bit real, but nothing about it feels dishonest either.

A potent but emotionally diffuse coming-of-age drama in which everything — even faith, even love — has the potential to be as exploitative as the deforestation that continues to eat away at the soul of the Amazon.

Blitz creates a rousing show of strength in the face of horrific civil strife, and there’s an undeniable power to how McQueen revisits the most visible chapter of his country’s history through the eyes of someone who’s so frequently been erased from its pages. If some of the movie is hurt by its failure to bear his imprint, that only serves to remind us just how valuable his imprint has become.

There’s good fun to be had in watching so many limbs get hacked off for the better part of two hours, but Director Kim can only dismember so many body parts before he starts to lose track of his movie’s spine.

This lilting tale’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity proves inseparable from the lasting power of its punch-to-the-gut impact.

If The Platform 2 iterates on the original idea in a way that proves this property’s franchise potential, it falls apart in almost the exact same way as the previous film, abandoning the broadly representational nature of its premise in favor of the maddeningly specific mythology of its silly non-characters.

Notice to Quit is redeemed by the simple fact of its nature: This isn’t a film that lives in the lows and highs of its defining moments so much as it’s a film that’s sustained by the strength it takes to put one foot in front of the other, and by the rush of rushing through New York City in lockstep with someone you care about.

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

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.

Smooth but vulnerable, clever but anonymous, desperate to provoke a human response but willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, “Relay” isn’t out to set the world on fire, it just wants to be a hand-crafted thriller that communicates a real sense of personal investment.

If Bob Fosse had fallen in love with CGI instead of jazz hands, this is probably the kind of movie he would’ve made.

All of You is an unusual high-concept relationship drama in that its concept seems to have absolutely no impact on the story whatsoever.

If only Heretic were as serious about religion as any of its characters (either for or against), perhaps the movie’s second half wouldn’t be so quick to descend into contrived parlor tricks and too-basic displays of suspense, but Beck and Woods aren’t really in the business of pushing any buttons.

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.

In this remarkable and shudderingly unresolved film, blessings and despair tend to become one and the same, two limbs of a shared body that Nina’s patients aren’t allowed to control for themselves.

Phillips struggles to find a shape for his story without having a Scorsese classic to use as a template, and while a certain degree of narrative torpor might serve “Folie à Deux” on a conceptual level, its turgid symphony of unexpected cameos, mournful cello solos, and implied sexual violence is too dissonant to appreciate even on its own terms.

Pure sense and subjectivity in a way that evokes the same visual magic of Ross’ documentary work, Nickel Boys so viscerally and fundamentally centers the experience of its young Black characters that even the most racist brand of revisionist history could never hope to deny their truth.

Forget in-jokes or fan service, this is a movie so long on cos-play (much of it brilliant) and short on character development (none of it interesting) that it requires a casual knowledge of the show’s lore to understand, let alone to enjoy.

Corbet and Fastvold’s script is left to engineer a reductive non-climax that illustrates the relationship between capitalist and laborer in the most obvious terms imaginable.

There’s a thin line between kindness and complicity, and “The End” achieves its sneakily immense power by dancing all over it with an ambivalence that Oppenheimer’s previous work never allowed for.