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.