David Rooney

While it unfolds in a hazy dream state rooted in Adam’s loneliness and the emotional suspension that has blocked him from moving forward, it’s by no means a downer. It’s a thing of beauty, heartfelt and unforgettable.

Ferrari is unlikely to go down as canonical Mann, lacking the glimmering, hard-edged stylishness of his best work. But admirers of the director’s high-intensity, muscular filmmaking will not go unrewarded.

While the investigative midsection slumps just a little, El Conde remains a spellbinding and mischievously spry spin on a deadly serious subject from a director who, in his tenth feature, continues to come up with audacious surprises.

Aided by the dynamic cinematography of regular Ari Aster collaborator Pawel Pogorzelski, a pulsing electronic score by Brit musician Bobby Krlic and sturdy effects work, Soto brings an assured hand, balancing action with character-driven scenes and comedy with suspense throughout. The pacing is brisk, infused with youthful energy, but never so frenetic that it doesn’t allow intimate exchanges time to breathe.

The Monkey King is no exception. It mines rich source material for a widely accessible episodic adventure laced with rowdy martial arts clashes and fantastical detours. Even if its Americanization follows a standard template, the movie maintains a flavorful sprinkling of the material’s cultural specificity.

It gets the job done and is sure to pull solid numbers. It doesn’t hurt that Gadot has appealing chemistry with co-star Jamie Dornan.

As much as it’s a joy to watch Statham slinging explosive harpoons from a jet ski, Meg 2 offers only scattershot pleasures. It’s too ridiculous to muster serious scares and too tonally uncertain to convince us that it’s consistently in on the joke.

This is an elegiac story, a humanistic metaphor for a vanishing world seen through the prism of a vulnerable couple cruelly written off by their families as worthless encumbrances.

This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios. It fully embraces the contradictions of an intellectual giant who was also a deeply flawed man, his legacy complicated by his own ambivalence toward the breakthrough achievement that secured his place in the history books.

While it’s a wisp of a movie, almost directionless at times and self-consciously quirky at others, Fremont contains enough poignantly observed interludes to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The movie is technically accomplished, well-acted, atmospherically unsettling and certainly watchable. . . But as genre material, it’s generic.

The strong cast, high-gloss production values and constant wow factor of the action offer plenty of distraction from the storytelling deficiencies.

Alberdi makes her directorial hand virtually invisible, observing her subjects from a discreet distance that allows them to be narrators of their own story while never speaking directly to the camera.

The impeccable selection of closing clips allows us to reimagine him as a man not just idolized as a star but accepted for the entirety of who he was.

Emerging from this extraordinary theatrical happening like a weary but still commanding oracle, Mac has shared a vision of America both personal and probing — tender, bruised and yet defiantly, magnificently hopeful. It’s simultaneously delirious and graced by what seems almost like ancient queer wisdom from somewhere way out there in the cosmos.

One of the captivating paradoxes of Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s lovingly assembled chapter of queer history is that while it never downplays the marginalization, persecution and physical danger of being a trans woman of color making a living through sex work, it gives equal time to the resilience, the sense of community, the proud sisterhood and shared survival skills.

This long-gestating stand-alone showcase for the Fastest Man Alive is enjoyable entertainment, even if it spends more time spinning its wheels than reinventing them.

Engrossing enough but also a bit meandering and underpowered.

Rohrwacher makes movies you sink into rather than watch dispassionately, taking time to establish the milieu as her characters and stories reveal themselves in layers.

The director has crafted a film of deceptive simplicity, observing the tiny details of a routine existence with such clarity, soulfulness and empathy that they build a cumulative emotional power almost without you noticing.

Running just 81 minutes, Fallen Leaves is slight compared to many of Kaurismäki’s more complex narratives, but its well of feeling creeps up on you and it delivers a good share of laugh-out-loud lines with droll aplomb. Besides, who are we to quibble about any gift from one of world cinema’s greatest treasures?

The film’s wistful hope for the future of cinema and its healing power ends up being too self-satisfied to register as an expression of collective faith.

It’s hard to engage with characters and situations that feel so studied, so stuck in a script that rarely allows them any emotional development — especially when the director himself seems so removed from them.

Even when its storytelling occasionally falters, the visual power of Thornton’s gorgeous compositions — in the monastery’s chiaroscuro interiors as well as the sprawling landscapes in the northern part of South Australia, near the former mining town, Burra — remains transfixing.

Rich in feeling yet never emotionally emphatic, The Breaking Ice has an uncluttered narrative simplicity that’s mirrored in the shooting style and nicely offset by the nuanced complexity of the relationships. The closing notes of hope and renewal are lovely.

The threat posed by women who think for themselves to the absolute power of men is a central theme in this starch-free tale of Tudor intrigue, its protofeminist perspective seamlessly woven into the narrative fabric without a hint of the didactic.

The director is poking around in territory that’s familiar to him — self-knowledge and public perception, identity and duality, transparency and performance, social norms and the sexual outlaw. But the emotional volatility of the story ends up being somewhat muted by the approach.

The three-and-a-half-hour running time is fully justified in an escalating tragedy that never loosens its grip — a sordid illustration of historical erasure with echoes in today’s bitterly divisive political gamesmanship.

At this point it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that Jonathan Glazer is incapable of making a movie that’s anything less than bracingly original.

The director’s customary delicacy, compassion and sensitivity ripple through the drama, though its affecting moments of illumination are more intermittent than cumulative.

This is a big, bombastic movie that goes through the motions but never finds much joy in the process, despite John Williams’ hard-working score continuously pushing our nostalgia buttons and trying to convince us we’re on a wild ride.

I’ll take this JLo as “nobody fucks with me or my daughter” killing machine, discovering her long-hidden maternal instincts, over those grimly generic rom-coms she cranks out once a year, which might as well be direct-to-inflight movies.

It’s watchable enough, but ultimately has the counterfeit feel of a filmmaker dabbling in a genre that’s not a natural fit and finding little joy in it.

The doc is stuffed with great archive material. But it largely squanders an ideal platform through which to reaffirm the subject’s vital place in pop music history and reclaim disco as a genre whose influence has never waned.

Fletcher conducts the high-speed chase more than competently, but it’s the sparks generated by de Armas and Evans that keep it buoyant.

This is a serious-minded, well-acted drama that shows just as keen an interest in character, specifically the integrity of two men from vastly different cultures who provide the story of brotherhood and survival with its racing pulse.

It’s Phoenix who keeps you glued even through the film’s sometimes challenging longueurs, in a performance as fully, insanely committed as any he’s ever given. If the character invites more cringing pity than emotional investment, that’s more to do with the distancing effect of Aster’s surreal approach than anything lacking in Phoenix’s raw, gaping wound of a characterization.

Ultimately, the film’s divided attention between its snapshot of a place stuck in time and its examination of the unsolved case that came to redefine it stops Last Stop Larrimah from being a first-rate true-crime doc. But there’s nonetheless a lot of flavorful material here.

The film is a little wispy, too often slapping another song on another dreamy sequence rather than giving us more intimate access to the main characters — let alone the secondary figures who make up the tight-knit queer family, most of whom don’t even get names. But the authenticity and distinctiveness of the milieu keep it involving.

Chinese writer-director Zhang Lu’s minor-key drama will be too muted and elusive to break beyond festivals, but its melancholy spell stays with you.

Led by an almost unrecognizable Simon Baker as a jaded cop, Limbo weaves in themes of racial inequity, broken individuals and fractured families to build quiet potency.

The modulation in the final stretch from extreme sorrow to regeneration and then a possibility of reconnection in the open ending is lovely.

The film is thematically a bit thin but doesn’t stint on genuine scares, intensity or revulsion.

Faltering storytelling and sloppy visual technique aside, the pas de deux of tenderness and violence, passivity and aggression between Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay keeps you watching, with both actors mostly overcoming the clichés in the way their characters are conceived. But Femme ends up being less subversive than it seems to think it is.

Although the storytelling conveys deep compassion for the plight of persecuted peoples, and Hussein’s unflinching performance speaks volumes, mostly without words, there’s a grim inevitability to The Survival of Kindness that becomes wearing, making its 96 minutes feel longer.

Even the formidable Dafoe at his most intense ultimately can’t stop Inside from succumbing to its own narrowness, devolving into a self-reflexive portrait of soul-sucking isolation.

Satter shows unfaltering command of the medium for a first-time film director, notably in her penetrating use of the closeup, which makes the steadily exposed raw nerves of Sydney Sweeney’s remarkable performance in the title role all the more disturbing to witness.

What Ralphie goes through over the course of this absorbing enough but bludgeoning portrait of corrosive masculinity makes him both victim and monster.

She Came to Me is a movie whose strained eccentricity gets positively goopy, conveying so little genuine feeling that the stakes for any of the characters never feel terribly high.

It’s an affectionately told story of Canadian innovation, loss of innocence and of unlikely bedfellows making entrepreneurial magic.

The new film doesn’t match the tightly wound narrative complexity or power of its predecessor; nor does it escape the occasional feel of actor-y self-indulgence. But the artistic rigor of the undertaking remains striking, as does the invaluable contribution of Danish sound designer Peter Albrechtsen in sculpting the disquieting atmosphere.

The bigger problem is that the movie leaves itself nowhere to go but deeper into biblical doom and gloom, with an unwavering sense of purpose that highlights Shyamalan’s able craftsmanship but also exposes the pointlessness of this claustrophobic exercise.

Writer-director Christopher Zalla adheres to the subgenre’s conventions and doesn’t stint on sentimentality, but Radical more than earns its surging emotional payoff.

Its surge of final-act feeling will speak to any audience that has ever experienced the startling reckoning that comes with grief.

This is the first feature for Gordon and Lieberman and there’s little evidence of a visual sense, even if the rough edges are part of the appeal. But perhaps due to the elements of improvisation, the comic timing is uneven and the material tends to be more often cute than uproarious.

It’s a quiet drama despite its characters’ many volatile arguments. Most of all, it’s a moving character portrait of a complicated woman who makes good and bad decisions but is motivated solely by the desire to create a better life for herself and the people she loves.

Cronenberg’s new film is less formally inventive and icy than Possessor, more narratively straightforward if no less disturbingly weird and grisly. But the go-for-broke extremity lacks the substance to make it more than an aggressive but shallow provocation.

It’s an all-in performance for the ages, layered with as much vulnerability as anger, and it’s to Majors’ credit that our hearts ache for Killian even — or perhaps especially — when he’s out of control.

If there’s a significant flaw to this confident and compelling debut feature, it’s that it’s sleazy enough to be fun beyond its serious-minded overturning of antiquated gender dynamics, but not quite trashy enough to be truly juicy.

It’s difficult to convey the multilayered beauty of Past Lives beyond just urging people to see it and lose themselves in its transfixing spell.

Rippling with sly humor and a bold command of the tropes of classic Hitchcockian suspense, this is a twisty and beguiling original, led by contrasting but expertly synced performances from Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway.

There’s a modesty about You Hurt My Feelings that makes it seem in some ways as simple and straightforward as its title. But Holofcener is such a gifted writer that it becomes a mosaic of mildly absurd minutiae, mixed in with legitimate feelings.

For all the movie’s quite credible conjecture about technology rendering nature obsolete and procreation becoming the privilege of the wealthy, The Pod Generation never fully hatches.

Justice regurgitates information that was largely already in the public sphere, so its main purpose will likely be as a for-the-record summation, albeit a workmanlike one puffed up here and there with generically ominous music to suggest murky machinations at the highest levels of government.

Seasoned documentarian Roger Ross Williams, who profiled Armendáriz in 2016 for the Amazon series The New Yorker Presents, makes an assured transition into narrative features with this entertaining biopic, which doubles as a gorgeous depiction of mother-son love and an exhilarating exploration of fearless queer identity in a macho environment.

M3GAN might be too frequently funny to be terrifying, but it’s never too silly to deliver tension and vicious thrills. It seems a safe bet that the killer doll will return, not to mention become an in-demand costume next Halloween.

This third collaboration between writer-director Scott Cooper and Christian Bale (following Out of the Furnace and Hostiles) is far stronger on gothic atmosphere than suspense. It’s capably acted and visually effective, with lots of mist-shrouded woodlands and chiaroscuro interiors, but the storytelling is stilted and uninvolving.

Critics will sniff, as they invariably do, about the familiar conventions of the music biopic. But the spirit of I Wanna Dance With Somebody transcends those conventions far more often than it gets weighed down by them. Anyone who loves Whitney Houston and her music will leave the film with that love reinforced — especially anyone who sees it in a theater with a wall-shaking sound system.

Propelled by Justin Hurwitz’s unrelenting wall-of-sound score, it’s often electrifying, to be sure, and certainly impressive in terms of sheer scale. How often do we get to see hundreds of non-digital extras in anything these days? But even when Chazelle takes a breather from the debauchery and gets his principals on a studio backlot or tries accessing them in more intimate moments, it all seems like one big, noisy, grotesque nostalgia cartoon.

In terms of narrative sophistication and even more so dialogue, this $350 million sequel is almost as basic as its predecessor, even feeble at times. But the expanded, bio-diverse world-building pulls you in, the visual spectacle keeps you mesmerized, the passion for environmental awareness is stirring and the warfare is as visceral and exciting as any multiplex audience could desire.

Where the drama is headed is never in doubt, and the steps it takes to get there are often familiar. Yet by this time we are sufficiently invested in the couple to care deeply. If anything, the intrusion of mortality makes the relationship more believable as both Parsons and Aldridge (Epix’s Pennyworth) imbue their scenes with warmth and heart, regret and exquisite sadness.

This sub-Hallmark dreck made by a bunch of hacks that don’t deserve to be named is the first film out of Lohan’s Netflix deal and her first feature in three years. Not to beat up on a former child star who has overcome more than her share of demons, but if this is the best vehicle she could find, waiting another three might not have been a bad idea.

Spirited owes its buoyancy primarily to the lively rapport of Ferrell and Reynolds, ultimately playing out the movie’s most convincing love story.

It’s impossible for Wakanda Forever to match the breakthrough impact of its predecessor, but in terms of continuing the saga while paving the way for future installments, it’s amply satisfying.

This is a work of unfailing restraint, which makes its stealth emotional heft all the more remarkable.

While it zips along with pleasingly brisk economy in the expository establishing scenes, newcomer Evan Parter’s Black List screenplay indulges in too many movie-ish contrivances to offer a genuinely provocative spin on Beltway shenanigans.

This is a uniquely tiresome slog — madly over-plotted, thuddingly derivative, insanely overlong and slathered in a big symphonic score that strives to infuse momentum into a saga with minimal emotional stakes.

The deep fondness for the source material comes through, and the painterly hand-drawn aesthetic is enchanting.

Till is more effective as an intimate portrait of devastating loss than a chronicle of the making of an activist. But the film has a powerful weapon in its arsenal in Danielle Deadwyler’s transfixing performance as a broken woman who finds formidable strength within herself.

David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is a lot of movies inelegantly squidged into one — a zany screwball comedy, a crime thriller, an earnest salute to pacts of love and friendship, an antifascist history lesson with fictional flourishes. Those competing strands all have their merits, bolstered by entertaining character work from an uncommonly high-wattage ensemble

Joel Edgerton’s haunted central performance as former white supremacist Narvel Roth fits the essential Schrader mold of a troubled soul hiding from his demons. But little else rings true in a drama curiously lacking in texture, which misses the mark in lifeless scene after scene.

Matt Sobel’s overhaul tones down the cruelty and eliminates the more grotesque touches, resulting in a chamber drama that never gets under the skin.

Panahi’s stoical presence at the center of all this is rattled, forcing him to contemplate the repercussions of his work both to himself and to even his most guileless collaborators. The sobering final image resonates with the unspoken cry of an artist exiled in his own homeland, saying, “Enough.”

It’s a small-scale film that many might call unambitious, favoring delicate observation over big emotional payoff.

Nyswaner and Grandage here let the lads get nude and sweaty, rolling around in a golden haze — lots of arched backs, hungry hands and eyes dilated in rapturous transport — that should at least set Styles fans’ hearts aflutter, albeit while remaining fairly decorous. But stodgy storytelling and clunky shifts between the drama’s two time periods dim the afterglow.

There’s brutality but also an understated hint of poetry in the way Bratton tells his story from deep inside it, making beautiful use of Baltimore experimental pop group Animal Collective’s richly varied electronic score, which often plays in gentle counterpoint to the harshness of what’s unfolding.

The tragic dimension of a woman adored by the world, devoured by Hollywood and ultimately abandoned to her own despair in an ordinary little house in Brentwood resonates because we know Marilyn’s sad story. But it’s hard to ignore the queasy feeling that Dominik is getting off on the tawdry spectacle. De Armas holds nothing back in connecting with the character’s pain. She deserves better.

This is Jackman’s movie. He makes Peter’s helplessness intensely moving as he keeps trying, against mounting odds and false breakthroughs, to communicate with a child who remains out of reach. Sadly, that goes for The Son, as much as the son.

Its chief merit is the rare opportunity it provides Saoirse Ronan to showcase her skills with bubbly comedy, making her the standout in a ridiculously overqualified ensemble. But despite the promise of that title, this wheezing romp slows to a limp.

The high-concept, low-satisfaction psychological thriller marks an ambitious upgrade in scope for Wilde from the character-driven coming-of-age comedy of Booksmart, and she handles the physical aspects of the project with assurance. It’s just a shame all the effort has gone into a script without much of that 2019 debut’s disarming freshness.

For all its wit, its lively talk and deceptive lightness, this is arguably the writer-director’s most affecting work.

The intense chamber drama never disguises its stage roots but transcends them with the grace and compassion of the writing and the layers of pain and despair, love and dogged hope peeled back in the central performance. Fraser makes us see beyond the alarming appearance to the deeply affecting heart of this broken man.

As a cleverly packaged pandemic production with narrative echoes of that global anxiety, it’s at the very least something fresh. A gruesome portrait of another young woman hungering for a life greater than the fate she’s been handed, it makes an amusing companion piece to X.

While the film’s emphatic style can become draining, and its attention to technique risks overshadowing the interpersonal drama, there’s an operatic grandeur here that won’t quit, giving the constantly escalating violence considerable power.

Guadagnino has made a kind of emo horror movie. He’s far less interested in the shock factor than the poignant isolation of his young principal characters and the life raft they come to represent to one another as they slowly let down their guard.

Audiences’ staying power for this meandering existential exploration of personal, professional and national identity — as tragicomic as it is rueful — will vary, depending on their interest in the artist or their appetite for the film’s aesthetic beauty.

Tár marks yet another career peak for Blanchett — many are likely to argue her greatest — and a fervent reason to hope it’s not 16 more years before Field gives us another feature. It’s a work of genius.

There’s much to appreciate in Noah Baumbach’s alternately exhilarating and enervating attempt to tame Don DeLillo’s comedy of death, White Noise, not least the daredevil spirit and ambition with which the writer-director and his cast plunge into the tricky material. But little in this episodic freakout hits the target quite so well as the wild end credits sequence.