Gary Thompson

Having unleashed Phoenix, Phillips doesn’t seem to know how to contain or couch the performance. At some point he seems to have surrendered, and when the movie is over you realize Arthur is its only substantial character.

The shared energy created by audience and performer that is so restorative to Garland is where the movie finds life.

The idea of knowing your place may be offensive, but the idea of having a place is appealing.

There is honest sentiment in the arc of this story, aided by the chemistry between Gottsagen and LaBeouf, and by the warm mood of the film.

The movie sometimes seems (like its title character) to drag its feet. It’s messy, but with the untidiness of real life.

Your fear that the movie will never end is the most palpable fear offered by Chapter Two, which substitutes spectacle for the creeping, escalating dread the story is meant to have, and that the first movie had in modest amounts.

Part of its appeal lies in the truth and specificity behind the clunky presentation.

Linklater is a naturally empathetic filmmaker, and you can feel him trying to find something he can latch onto in the Desperate Housewives cat-fighting that dominates the movie in the early going. He’s helped ultimately by the story, and by the performances of Blanchett and Wiig, who are given room to embellish their characters and relationships.

Like many a good documentary, Honeyland takes us to a faraway land and culture in a way that reveals what is distinctive and what is universal about people.

Its purpose is to make the lives of the oppressed seem real by making their suffering real.

There is mismatch of tone and content throughout The Kitchen, which is never sure how to pair its lurid turns of plot with its intersectional feminist ambitions.

Despite the movie’s emphasis on physical action, it’s this chemistry that keeps the movie going.

There is a lot to like here, a few things to love. Like the fact that someone in Hollywood can still assemble a cast this large and impressive — someone who does not work for Marvel.

The new King is competent, reasonably entertaining, faithful to the original, wholesome, sometimes even enjoyable.

Stuber and Shaft are the kind of movies Hollywood made every month back in the ’80s and ’90s, until audiences — after a half dozen or so Lethal Weapons — grew tired of them. Stuber serves to remind us of why we liked them, and also that they wore out their welcome.

The script is shrewd about the problems that money can and can’t solve. Wild Rose also threads the needle between the genre expectations and its own brand of realism, grounded in the very palpable heartache Rose feels as she tries to survive in the space between her family obligations and her artistic ambitions.

A movie as atmospheric as Hereditary, narratively more satisfying, but much, much longer.

The value and uses of spectacle become part of the story in Far From Home, which can be read as a bit of playful in-house MCU criticism of CGI fatigue.

The movie simply has the best use of music (Talbot is also a musician) that I’ve seen this year, starting with a gorgeous score by Daniel Herskedal , and embellished with the smart, eclectic use of songs that speak to the city’s cultural history.

A funny, freaky, often profound animated adventure that is certainly the best movie ever made about a spork.

In Framing John DeLorean, Philadelphia-based documentarians Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce (The Art of the Steal) mix fact, drama, and speculation to draw an ambitious portrait of the fabled automaker, but within the frame, key questions remain unanswered.

Jarmusch, in his droll way, both celebrates and subverts the familiar elements of the genre.

The movie mainly rides on the chemistry and charm of its two leads, and writer Kaling has given Thompson a substantial character to play.

The plot particulars are flimsy and laughable by design — this Shaft has been put together by folks with an instinct for comedy.

Developments give Erskine a chance to play hurt and wounded, and she handles this as beautifully as she does the light comedy. She’s the plus in Plus One.

No neuralizers needed for Men In Black: International — you’ll forget you’ve seen it not long after walking out.

Dark Phoenix has a cast of lame-duck actors wearing expressions that say, “Check, please,” and the movie has the kind of knotty, suspenseless plotting that makes the veins in your head throb.

In some ways the movie’s crazy fictions suit today’s modern mash-up sensibilities, and its cast reflects the patterns of modern migration that are creating a whole new world.

The movie clicks, and given the sorry state of movie comedy, its ability to be consistently funny stands out. It is expertly, briskly paced — shout out to the judicious and effective editing of Jamie Gross.

The only creepy things about Brightburn, though, are its labored, derivative narrative, its giddy sadism (it gets off on Brandon’s adolescent power trip, and expects its audience to do the same), and its cynical built-in branding.

A tweak toward conventional drama might have added to the movie’s impact, but it’s scrupulous and straightforward.

The movie is romantic and sexy, and its exploration of the masculine and feminine (fire and water, yin and yang) is inventive and playful.

Often fascinating, and sometimes even moving. There are lessons here about the cycle of life that can only be driven home by the real, random, and sometimes cruel dictates of fate.

Much rides on the actors’ ability to connect as they brush aside the obvious credibility obstacles, and the movie’s pop genericism doesn’t help — half the movie’s running time feels like it’s a pop music montage of the fetching young couple kissing, nuzzling, holding hands, so it often feels less like an ad for Invisaline.

The goal for director Stahelski is escalating violence and bloody chaos, pushed to the point of the preposterous and beyond.

The movie is at its best when the women are focused on the common enemy: getting older.

Not long into Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, it becomes clear that the movie is never going to make what you might call sense.

Yes, Tolkien is a little on-the-nose. But there is also an undeniable appeal to the life-art allusions that drive this earnest movie, which is handsomely mounted, well-cast, and well-acted.

Wilson and Hathaway don’t click. The characters feel as if they were workshopped separately, and efforts to combine their comic energy on screen fall flat.

If HGTV and Lifetime had a TV channel baby, it would produce movies like The Intruder.

This is an intriguingly weird, gender inversion of the Cinderella fantasy at the root of Pretty Woman.

Their personal stories are just as interesting, and taken together, they add insight into our nation’s unusual political moment, equal parts instability and possibility.

I wasn’t sure, after the tedium of Infinity War, that Marvel could wrap this up in a satisfying way. Turns out, it was a snap.

It’s a movie touching on labor issues that some may find a bit labored, but for the patient viewer there are insights — Leigh is giving us a history lesson that makes some pointed nods toward the current Brexit debate.

Fast Color is disciplined and restrained, yet feels a few tweaks away from being the rousing origin story it aspires to be.

Result[s] in pleasant but forgettable results.

High Life has the trippy profundity of 2001, the human treachery of Aliens, and it also includes an Orgasmatron.

Yeoh’s fantastic as usual, making an impressive series of moves while not disturbing a single hair on her period Joey Heatherton hairdo.

The idea that “little” Jordan’s response to attractive older men is guided by her inner adult yields some creepy-funny laughs that many will find mostly creepy.

The direction by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, is competent and efficient, if not especially stylish or ambitious, and the squeamish should know the movie is backloaded with stabby, graphic, slasher-movie content.

Pulling us through all of it is Place, who imbues her character with a touching persistence, and gives striking depth and dimension to this “regular” woman, who used to be a regular.

The movie itself is chill. The filmmakers were going for (and mostly achieve) the 1980s Amblin Entertainment feel of a movie out to have an unpretentious good time — a welcome throwback to days before comic books movies became gargantuan and grim.

Hotel Mumbai sometimes surrenders to melodrama and action-genre imperatives, and it mixes actual people like Oberoi with fictional composites in a way that strays from the stringent just-the-facts discipline of a docudrama like United 93. But there is value, too, in its subjective approach.

The small miracles that do occur in The Mustang feel real, and well–earned.

As Knightley and Skarsgard wrestle with this material and each other, the movie around them goes plot crazy.

This movie has nearly as high a body count as "Us"...Is this satire? Homage? More like the desperation of a director who’s supplanted “vision” for emotion. The story leaves Dumbo without meaningful links to the human characters, and the scattered story of Farrell’s cohering family falls flat.

The title character in Gloria Bell is a fiftysomething divorcée, and the movie is uncommonly generous to her by the sometimes standards of contemporary Hollywood.

Though mired in arcane subject matter, the movie is always lucid and reasonably engaging.

What Peele conjures here in the final moments is clever enough to remind us that he was telling an intricate story all along, and not just piling up bodies.

In the end, a coherent tone eludes Elba, but he shows promise as a scene-setter, and the movie displays an effective use of color.

The movie is actually not bad, until it goes full Lifetime Channel crazy in the third act.

Though fact-based movies are often guilty of bending truth to improve a story, Finding Steve McQueen goes in the other direction, downplaying strange-but-true elements that might have helped its saggy narrative.

I wonder if Noe is familiar with the work of Three Dog Night, and their 1970 rumination on a party gone bad, “Mama Told Me Not to Come.” Its lyrics apply here: “I’ve seen so many things I ain’t never seen before. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t want to see no more.”

Years from now, chances are that when people sit around and talk enthusiastically about that movie with Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, the subject is most likely to be Kong: Skull Island.

Though it’s been many years in development, it remains a timely look at the dangers of our increasingly outsourced, privatized military-intelligence network.

Neil Jordan gives us a fancier version of the Lifetime staple in Greta.

It’s easy enough to guess where this is going, but the movie gets the details right, and the relationships play out in a satisfying way, aided by Merchant’s consistently funny writing and light touch.

The movie really soars when the dragons do the same — as in previous installments, the best shots are of dragons maneuvering through the clouds.

It’s a story with too many influences, no cohesion, no apparent narrative purpose.

In conceptual terms, the movie has more in common with Scream, in that it’s an examination of genre clichés (in this case romantic comedies) that both satirizes and embraces them.

The acting is fine throughout, and director Labaki (she plays Zain's lawyer) has a genius for handling untutored performers like Al Rafeea.

They Shall Not Grow Old avoids geopolitics to concentrate on the lives of the common soldier and the reality of trenches — the horseplay, camaraderie, boredom, disease, squalor, and terror that were all part of life on the front. It’s a sobering, moving success.

The remake, directed by Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke, makes substantial changes — taking the bare bones of the story and turning into a sort action-fable about female empowerment, starring Jane the Virgin headliner Gina Rodriguez.

Cold War, a love story about music and musicians, is for people who found A Star Is Born way too cheerful and optimistic. It’s pretty downbeat, but it’s also another black-and-white (subtitled) marvel from Pawel Pawlikowski.

There is a lot of plot in those final minutes, and don’t bother trying to outguess the magician. He pulls a rabbit out of a hat, just to distract you from the next rabbit.

This is a funny, affectionate and surprisingly touching film.

Even if you haven’t seen The Intouchables, you have a pretty good idea where the drama is headed. Still, The Upside nonetheless does an amiable job of taking you there, thanks to hard work by the two leads.

The fact that it’s a Razzie contender, of course, is no reason not to see it. In fact it could be an inducement — Razzie movies can be quite fun.

The story circles cleverly back on itself, putting an original spin on the familiar tale of the burned-out investigator reckoning with the defining event in a checkered career.

A more nuanced Bale portrait of a man enamored of secrecy, strong-arming, militarism, and vigilante impulses can be found in The Dark Knight.

Ben is Back, operating with the flexibility of fiction, flirts with the idea that a mother’s intuition and love can be decisive, even as it acknowledges the pitiless, relentless nature of the disease. Or maybe all the movie wants to propose is that miracles — rare as they are — can happen.

The movie works best when it falls back on plain old acting. Merritt Wever is sweet presence as the hobby shop worker and gentle soul who understands Mark’s obsessions, and appreciates his art. Her scenes with Carell are the movie’s least technological, and its best.

At least Aquaman has a different palette, and new shapes to work with. It’s still ultimately silly and dreary, and will test the endurance of fans who then must withstand an even longer credit sequence to get a whiff of the next DC story wrinkle.

The elegiac air that surfaces here and there in Bathtubs blends nicely with Young’s own final days on Late Show, reading his separation papers and wondering how to look for a job in his 50s.

The more-is-more approach to superhero movies is usually a deadly mistake, but it works nicely in the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

While the movie is often dazzling, it’s also frequently dull.

Ronan is good (as usual) as the spirited and rather haughty Mary, making the most of what, to be fair, is the plum role.

This glossy, handsomely budgeted musical deploys topflight talent throughout, from casting to choreography to songwriting to animation and modern digital effects, and though it achieves a Poppins-like level of hyper-competence, it lacks the most elusive attribute we associate with Mary — magic.

The foster-care comedy Instant Family has more heart than laughs, but enough of the former to squeak by.

The premise is a borderline gimmick, but director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) invests the movie with enough grit — it's set in the world of hardboiled Chicago politics — to draw us in.

As played by Jackman, he's imperious, self-righteous, and humorless, and it's hard to imagine such a figure capturing the imagination of the public, policy acumen notwithstanding. The movie is better at showing Rice (Sara Paxton) as a woman trampled by the press stampede — ditto Hart's wife Lee, played elegantly by Farmiga.

Buster Scruggs, it seems, is about not just the Old West, but The West in a larger sense.

Ali and Mortensen make the friendship feel real, using some unexpected tools from Farrelly's kit. His comedic instincts help the movie tiptoe through some dangerous cultural minefields.

The movie sticks to formula, and spells everything out.

Hedges is an efficient, expressive actor, and has the knack for conveying complex information with a look or a gesture, as he does here, suggesting the turmoil within his character on the night when his parents assign him to undergo therapy.

Pike plays Colvin as selfless, but also a woman who would have pitched a drink in your face for calling her that. The movie takes Colvin's cue. At no point is her personal drama bigger than the suffering of the people on whom she is reporting, and the concluding events in Syria are particularly well-handled and tactful.

Robert's relationship with Elizabeth is actually one of the film's better features – it is here that Pine's low-key charisma is put to its best use, and his chemistry with Pugh is useful in establishing the emotional foundation of their resilient marriage, which held together during the times of defeat, separation, and victory.

Kahn surveys artists, dealers, auctioneers, and gallery operators to provide a synopsis of the New York art world, and is at its most interesting when profiling artists who represent differing attitudes toward the way money affects their work.