Gary Thompson

Chalamet and Hammer map this progression expertly.

There are a few fearful moments when you think the movie will be a collection of affectations. But the characters are too real, Gerwig’s eye for the adolescent lives of young women too keen.

A few actors with limited range are asked to do too much. Still, it doesn’t stop the momentum of this engaging, humane little movie, which builds the moment when its internal worlds finally collide — Moonee’s self-willed magic kingdom, her mother’s less hopeful reality.

It's nice to see Scorsese making a cameo here, a kind of symbolic olive branch that may herald an overdue armistice. At last, it's OK to like Marty and Bob. [16 Sept 1994, p.53]

Surely one of the funniest movies ever made. [12 Sept 2001, p.53]

These sequels trade directly on the emotional legacy of the originals (The Last Jedi makes some leaps into sentimental hyperspace, particularly in the way that it handles Fisher on-screen), and the more of the aged Luke and Leia we see, the more we chip away at the mythic power of characters as Lucas left them: Young, strong, immortal.

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.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a cockeyed love story that starts as weirdly as it ends.

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.

For Iannucci, who loves to mock the craven, unprincipled pursuit of power, the scenario is an antic delight and plays to his talent for hectic plot turns and (pardon the expression) rapid-fire dialogue.

It’s a remarkable performance by McDormand, matched by Rockwell.

A movie that could have been about loss and defeat becomes something else — a testament to spiritual stamina, to the power of family bonds and their importance to homes, to streets, to neighborhoods and to cities.

You see that Cooper has taken the frayed ends of American culture and knitted them together — male and female, urban and rural, folksy and hip, rich and poor, finding common ground through music. You see songs move through different musical idioms, and you see the power that can have, as long as people are willing to listen.

The movie has metaphors to burn, and those looking for provocative commentary will surely find it. Foxtrot, though, is a slippery thing that resists easy categorization, and will reward viewers who wait until all of its secrets have been revealed.

Leave No Trace, is less story-driven than Winter’s Bone (which made a star of Jennifer Lawrence), more lyrical, more attuned to the melancholy of the novel and its quiet portrait of a young woman caught between dependence and independence, love and fear.

Black Panther sticks to Marvel orthodoxy, and yet does so with a nearly all black cast (Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis have small roles), and with strikingly Afro-centric production design. In the process it freshens and enlivens the Marvel brand.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? charts the offbeat alliance and ultimately the friendship that develops between the Hock and Israel, a bond that exists somewhere between proximity and affinity.

[Cruise] makes the movie fun to watch with his age-defying eagerness and death-defying stunts that bring a reasonably human scale back to blockbuster action, benumbed of late by the low-stakes digital fakery of special-effects movies.

Writer-director Ari Aster excels at making these old-school horror movie moves (he gets great mileage out of seance scenes), and the intensifying atmosphere of dread is thick. And he layers on effective, original ideas.

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.

Del Toro somehow manages to keep the deeply weird mash-up of ideas and images coherent, unified by style and mood.

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.

Stunning. [25 Nov 1994, p.87]

It’s a tough two hours, but director Zvyagintsev invites engagement by giving us more than a chronicle of dysfunction — he’s searching for its source.

The Big Sick is romantic and funny, but the movie is way too sprawling and ambitious to be contained by the words romantic comedy.

A spare, meticulously crafted movie.

The movie is a little too postured.... Even Baby’s busy backstory threatens to make him a collection of quirky details. But all of that artifice is probably part of the point, best appreciated by generation Ear Bud and its preference for curated experiences.

It all adds up to a handsome, engrossing slice-of-life movie with the feel of a Western, inventive and unique. The Rider desegregates a genre that typically presents cowboys and Indians as separate and opposing forces – archetypes unified here in one remarkable individual.

Writer-director Bo Burnham is after something different here, a complex, thoughtful and funny look at the way the internet can insert itself into the coming-of-age search for identity.

This is another fine performance from Hall, who's given a good character to play by writer-director Andrew Bujalski.

Cowriter and director Dee Rees (Pariah, Bessie) does a skillful job making us feel these inequities as they take place over time and become the fabric of lives, the basis of the assumptions people make about race and culture — the way things are.

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.

It is a portrait not of grinding earnestness but of a penetrating sincerity, the kind that reduces the cynical, the skeptical, and the callous to tears.

The Last Days is full of children and grandchildren. This idea of regeneration is a common thread that connects the stories of the five survivors, and provides the documentary with its unexpected warmth and redemptive power. [05 Mar 1999, p.51]

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 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.

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

It’s not very deeply felt. Phoenix gives his all, but Ramsay plops us down in the middle of Joe’s breakdown, before we can get our emotional bearings. We figure out who he was — abused child, traumatized soldier – before we get a sense of who he is.

Well, the movie is trippy and almost willfully opaque — all I can say for sure is I left A Ghost Story feeling full.

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.

He's not an easy man to read, and he's not meant to be (Foy carries most of the emotional load). First Man relies on Gosling's own low-rev screen presence to hold the viewer's interest. Not until we reach the surface of the moon does the movie really venture into his head (almost literally in terms of camera point of view).

Based on a novel by Ian McEwan, The Children Act wanders into the tricky space created when what is moral and what is legal diverge, and law is made to suffice.

Jenkins does something daring with the story's resolution – conceptually brilliant, but you may think that it pays a small dividend on a large emotional investment.

The title promises something of a biography, but I left the movie wanting to know more about Stallworth.

Spielberg and Co. are obviously excited to be making The Post, and that palpable enthusiasm makes the movie feel so unusually lively for a big-studio movie. It’s nimble, crisp, passionate, full of verve and invention.

One part beautiful fable, one part cheesy "Rocky" clone, "Fly Away Home" is nonetheless a notch above most flimsy Hollywood movies made primarily for children. [13 Sep 1996, p.44]

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

The contributions of the actors now blend more seamlessly with the animation to create digital characters, and the characters are being integrated more successfully and believably into the landscape — director Matt Reeves works on a big widescreen canvas of sweeping, picturesque exteriors.

Krasinski makes suspension of disbelief easy, and the movie mostly works — I can’t remember the last time I was in a movie theater so quiet.

Hearts Beat Loud (despite is gooey title) has a bittersweet tone that tells us that Frank’s dreams are mostly wishful thinking. In that way, Hearts is of a piece with other movies by writer-director Brett Haley, wherein the art has the power to ameliorate rather than transform.

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.

The chief pleasure of Isle of Dogs is admiring its lovably tactile stop-motion creatures (more than 1,000 rendered characters, a stop-motion record) and meticulous backdrops, giving the movie a deep-focus depth of field uncommon to animation.

Night Comes On isn’t a docudrama, but it’s informed enough to give us a sense of the obstacles facing young women like Angel.

It is often a captivating visual marvel, using newfangled special effects in ways that aspire more to the poetic than the kinetic.

In general, Coco is the kind of first-rate technical production you expect from Pixar. On the other hand, it often feels more frantic than exciting, and it counts on moments of humor that often do not materialize.

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.

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.

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

At every turn, Starr's situation gets more nuanced and more engrossing, and in the hands of director George Tillman Jr., the movie maintains a confident, sweeping scope without every losing command, or its nerve.

The movie was (apparently) shot guerrilla style by director Weinstein, though the filmmakers have been coy as to which scenes were captured stealthily and which are dramatized. This leads to questions about tact and voyeurism that go unanswered and frankly made me a little queasy.

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.

The movie pitches Connie’s behavior as the spur-of-the-moment improvisations of a hustler out to save his brother, often played for laughs, but a ruthlessness shows through. This adds a toxic tone to scenes that involve immigrants and minorities, though this is probably unintended.

Jack-Jack turns out to be a jackpot. The movie is frankly slow to get cranking, and we don’t really know what we’re missing until the unsupervised infant goes to war with a mischievous raccoon.

The actors make the most of Baumbach’s lively script.

Lean on Pete is life affirming in that it affirms life is hard and unforgiving.

The story is nonlinear, a collection of images that can suddenly assemble into an emotion.

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.

Lucky, written as a tribute to Harry Dean Stanton, ends up being a fitting cinematic eulogy to the late actor, who died last month.

The Endless works on its own modest spooky-kooky terms, and also as a rumination on life’s ruts and patterns, best considered over a couple of beers.

It's a nice gesture that he's chosen The Old Man and the Gun as his exit vehicle, gifting fans with heaping helpings of his relaxed charm, making a nod to the Sundance Kid, and even the flimflam fun of The Sting.

It's a bold and borderline eccentric performance by Mulligan.

It's Close who nearly rescues The Wife, grabbing control of it in the crucial final moments, managing to transcend the script to suggest a more complex portrait of Joan, whose life choices form their own narrative, with their own reward.

Garland’s alien biodome is a trippy mixture of tactile old school hardware and computer-generated images. It combines to give his brightly ominous new world a sinister sheen, especially when showing how it has consumed/subsumed the old seaside community it has displaced.

Sometimes these anecdotes show courageous and admirable striving, and a genuine love of science. Sometimes they show something less inspiring – the way systems can be gamed by competitors whose specialized knowledge of rules combine with tactics and strategies that give them an advantage, so what's being measured and honored is not always aptitude and innate genius.

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

Khan and Macdonald make it watchable.

The War Room is far more interesting, however, as an unintentional commentary on the evolving (or de-evolving) nature of documentary itself, and on Pennebaker's famous style - the shaky hand-held shots, the grainy film stock, the abrupt zooms and changes in focus. The style is known as cinema verite, the very name suggesting that what you see is spontaneous and "true." [12 Jan 1994, p.36]

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.

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.

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.

Phoenix has a way of drawing most of the camera's energy toward him, but Reilly, in his own mysterious and quiet way, can hold his own with anyone, be it Ricky Bobby or King Kong.

Mira Nair is a director who, for a change, is not obsessed by the way bigotry pulls people of different cultures apart. Instead, she is amazed by the way love keeps bringing them together. [12 Feb 1992, p.41]

The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely – in its own surreal way (nods to Idiocracy and The Island of Dr. Moreau), it stands as one of the few Hollywood movies to show an awareness of chronic low-wage pressures in our full-employment economy.

The movie has things on its mind, like the expendability of labor in the modern workplace.

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

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

What Sugar Hill lacks is modulation. The entire movie is played at the same high level of dramatic intensity - tragedy piled on tragedy, confrontation piled on confrontation, grand speech upon grand speech. Impassioned though this approach is, it eventually takes on a cumulative feeling of bombast. [25 Feb 1994, p.38]

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

The movie is a pitch-black comedy, told with a wink and a smirk by unreliable narrators, who include Harding, her mother, and her husband — all presenting self-serving versions of the truth, often standing in arch contrast to the images we are shown.

Dunst is playing it straight here, but there is enough arch in Kidman’s eyebrow to signal that Coppola is having fun around the edges of this Southern gothic, with its formal compositions and deliberate pacing (as usual, a little too deliberate for my taste).

When we finally leave the hotel, the movie’s energy is spent.

The Disaster Artist really hangs on James Franco’s performance. He’s an uncanny mimic of Wiseau’s legendary accent and mannerisms, but what he really nails is Wiseau’s complete lack of self-awareness.

Lady Macbeth is a mash-up of a different sort — it’s not strictly Shakespeare, but based on a Nikolai Leskov novel that transplanted elements of the play to 1865 Russia. Like "Shanghai Knights," this film adaptation is a period drama, but the actions of the woman are faintly anachronistic — modern attitudes transplanted into 19th-century characters.

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.

Maslany is first-rate in this role.

The movie's best window into Foley comes via his music, played expressively by Dickey, whose performance finds humor in Foley's rather sad life.

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

One of the movie’s goals is to grant neurodiverse subjects their full measure of humanity, and to that end, Dina is candid on the subject of sex, where the movie also finds its loose narrative arc.