Emily Yoshida

After a couple musical numbers, it occurs to you that the film you’re watching is every bit as animated as the original, but it’s somehow turned out less lifelike, despite its considerable technological advantage.

It’s not that Blindspotting doesn’t have important points to make about how individuals live in a collective history of racialized violence. It’s that it has a hard time making those points feel organic to the story and style, whether it’s going for realism or over-the-top musical-theater territory.

Heineman’s film is, in many ways, the movie so many people say they want: a portrait of a deeply complex, flawed, but brilliant and forceful woman. But as tempting as it is to think of Pike’s Colvin, with her eyepatch and sailor’s mouth, as a “badass,” there’s not much that’s aspirational about the film.

Phillips kind of stumbles when he tries for a pat wrap-up of a still-horrific problem. But when he digs into the muck of the rot at the heart of it, he comes up with some unforgettable moments.

Two biographical documentaries in, and it still feels like we’re in need of a Houston film that digs into her music first, and the hows and whys of its enduring power.

The flatness that is meant to shock early on quickly becomes boring, and the movie never sparks, slogging on in its nearly unbroken monotone all the way to its climactic moment.

During the many scenes back home in Jamaica, blessed with the lively Jones clan as subjects, the director doesn’t have any idea what to do with her camera.

The film is packed with so many strange gems of moments, and while a few feel like Bong losing the plot (specifically any time Okja decides to loosen her bowels) it always snaps back together.

It’s at once familiar and unsettling, with shades of "Pan’s Labyrinth" and "Return to Oz."

What Mary lacks in the resources to visually gobsmack, it partially makes up for with its unstoppable titular ginger, whose empathy, depressive streak, and enviably fierce eyebrows place her shoulder to shoulder with any Ghibli heroine.

Politeness may be the film’s weakest point, whether with its characters or bedroom scenes. But it’s hardly something to complain about, especially when the company is this lively.

It’s intermittently successful, but even in its more meandering moments it is a gripping, almost unbearably dark watch.

Luckily, Crazy Rich Asians is, at its heart, a fish-out-of-water story, and it has a lot more going for it than its literal money shots.

To see an unfettered nightmare like this from such an idiosyncratic director feels like a cruel treat, and a welcome stylistic stretch.

As an origin story for a young actor’s warped worldview, Honey Boy is compelling.

Östlund’s eye for the subtleties of human behavior, especially public behavior, never fails.

From the script to the music to the unfinished-feeling sound edit — nothing about Sierra Burgess feels like it got past a first draft.

It never gets tiring to watch the girls coast down the Manhattan streets, cocky and breezy and effortless, turning the heads of younger girls who gaze at them, starstruck. But it’s also featherlight, not meant to endure much longer than those brief airborne moments Camille and her friends live for.

As it turns out, the Ferris wheel is the other perfect parallel to Love, Simon, not the most thrilling ride in the park, a little slow, utterly predictable, perhaps even welcoming the label of “boring.” But like the chorus of a latter-day Taylor Swift song, it will lift you up, goddammit, and good luck trying to stop it.

Haneke’s integration of the ways we communicate and conduct our lives via phone and laptop feels uniquely effective.

Amid all the important facts, I longed for something unnecessary from the filmmaker, some expressive flourish whose sole purpose isn’t just to convey information. Again I find myself typing the words, “It’s an unquestionably worthy story, I just wish it was told with more inventiveness.”

Only the Brave feels like a film that would have made sense coming from Peter Berg or Michael Bay, but Kosinski mostly pulls back on the macho cheerleading to find something more objective, and ultimately, deeply emotional.

There aren’t a lot of people to necessarily sympathize with here, but the collective swell of a thousand nagging disappointments, both identifiable and not, make Perry’s film strangely haunting despite the bourgeois mundanity of its events.

Her ability to take in the chaos and darkness of the ’70s and find some kind of acceptance through her writing is what makes her as relevant as ever.

The Incredible Jessica James is a little odd duck of a film, an old-fashioned romantic comedy that’s decidedly modern in its frame of reference, a character-driven piece that never lets us too deep into its protagonist, a movie as pleasant as it is fleeting.

It’s painful, paranoiac stuff, and your heart breaks for Tyler, who feels increasingly trapped among a crew of rowdy, drunk, irreverent white dudes, as these little injustices mount.

Suspiria is a gorgeous, hideous, uncompromising film, and while it seeks to do many things, settling our minds about the brutality of the past and human nature is not one of them.

Perhaps the greatest gift of Maria by Callas that gives it an advantage over so many recent biographical music documentaries is how willing it is to let its subject just perform, uninterrupted.