Glenn Kenny

Writer-director Mike Leigh is 81 years old, and his movies consistently have a fire that's practically adolescent while imparting a wisdom that's possibly ancient. "Hard Truths" is a tragi-comedy character study of near-febrile vitality. And, entering the sweepstakes rather late in the game, it's one of the very few great films of 2024.

Day of the Fight is an unabashed genre picture that manages to be both the kind of movie they supposedly don’t make like they used to, and also something bracingly fresh. It’s anchored by the lead actor, Michael C. Pitt, here ferocious and heart-stabbingly vulnerable in equal proportion.

Even at its relatively trim 89-minute runtime, "Armor" feels padded.

This is one of those pictures where the actors outdo the conventional material they are given to work with.

Despite Brosnan's best efforts, this is a movie with its heart in the right place and its head somewhere substantially other.

The movie manages to provide moments of witty dialogue while moving forward with its spiritual duties.

In addition to ridiculous — think the Wayans brothers’ parody pictures, or “Napoleon Dynamite” (that movie’s director, Jared Hess, is an executive producer here) — the humor is almost uniformly broad.

At this point in time, Springsteen is the world’s greatest living entertainer, full stop. “Road Diary,” a new documentary directed by Thom Zimny, offers dynamic proof for this argument.

In the end, the wafer-thin story amounts to the same nihilistic slop that Phillips served up in the first “Joker,” albeit remixed, genre-wise.

One could argue that Forster and company calibrate their anodyne effects to make a Holocaust narrative that’s palatable for younger viewers. But what mostly resonates is a particularly lachrymose brand of show-business hedging.

It’s a movie best received in a relaxed frame of mind. Because much of it is a slow burn, if there’s indeed a burn at all.

Berry is drained of glamour for her role here, and she performs with fierceness; the two boys are also stalwart, but what the movie asks these child performers to do doesn’t add up to effective horror — it’s just opportunistic and gross.

The action choreography is better than passable, although Perry adds grindhouse-movie levels of gore and dismemberment in a dubious effort to up the thrill quotient.

This is neither a trifle nor a truly Major Motion Picture; it’s an entertainment maybe in the sense that Graham Greene used the term. But one needn’t be so hifalutin about the matter.

It all makes for a plodding film, more curious than compelling.

The direction is energetic, incorporating frantic flashbacks and resourceful split-screen perspectives, and the plot adds several new twists not found in the first movie. Rest assured, this may be a remake, but it’s not a retread.

The movie’s senses of cinema are never present for self-consciously clever, self-referential reasons. Rather, they’re deeply intertwined with considerations of age and mortality.

A spectacularly inane comedy.

It frequently seems that what the movie ultimately wants from Samuel Beckett is for him not to have been…well, Samuel Beckett.

Viewers who press play with intent to scoff may be surprised with how genuinely caught up they become.

Although the milieu of “Coup!” speaks allegorically to the pandemic of our own century, it does so softly; the movie is ultimately more a tale of class warfare than public health.

The movie plods around awkwardly, trying to leech whatever charm it can from the remaining elements of the original.

Sharks, while undeniably lethal, are also, studies have shown, kind of dumb. And “The Last Breath” is a cheesy new thriller that is even dumber than a real shark.

Porter’s inquisitive camera gives the viewer enticing detail on how everything comes together — for instance, unbeknown to the audience, the pool is constantly monitored by rescue divers in scuba gear who also serve as prop people — while holding in suitable awe the actual magic all this work eventually yields.

Akin is here working in a tradition established in Italian Neo-realism — and by the end of the film, he shows he can turn on the viewer’s tear ducts as deftly as De Sica did in his prime — but his narrative approach brings a vivid freshness to the proceedings.

It would be reductive to call it a “girlboss” story, but it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to, either.

Too often this muddled movie, which never really settles on a tone, plays its espionage plot points with a dour seriousness that’s at odds with a teen comedy.

The film works most of the time, largely because its subject is such interesting — and warm — company.

As the movie progresses, its story grows convoluted and belabored.

Burstyn’s character, which the actor plays with her customary expertise, is so utterly disagreeable that viewing the picture is a mostly anxious experience with not much of a reward at the end, which shifts to magic realist mode for lack of anywhere better to go.

It is a daring and assured subversion of conventional film language that will likely infuriate certain viewers and reward others.

King is not exactly outclassed by Nicole Kidman, Kathy Bates and Zac Efron. But the movie’s script, by Carrie Solomon, puts her at a disadvantage.

This is a confounding movie. Its pace is leaden, its structure lopsided, and while Dunham and Fry are both first-rate performers, their respective personae — both public and on-screen — are difficult for them to fully transcend.

Stahl’s acting has always had a quiet power, communicating roiling emotional distress under an often vaguely menacing stillness. This gives a fresh perspective to Ryan’s eventual impotence as he negotiates his new identity.

Duchovny’s smarts are commendable, theoretically, but the movie falls short of compelling. And for all the novelistic details that he packs in, Reverse the Curse moves at the pace of a self-defeating snail.

The directorial debut of French-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy, this is one of those pictures to which the phrase “every frame a painting” might apply.

Whatever “Flipside” ultimately “means,” it’s ninety minutes well, and often amusingly and movingly, spent.

This is one of those movies that proves, when they’ve got a mind to, they can still make them like they used to.

All of this is laid out in competent commonplace fashion, with the principal actors Terry Chen, Greg Kinnear and the always welcome Fionnula Flanagan displaying the expected professionalism.

Hong’s new film, “In Our Day,” is not atypical—it’s a plain-looking, often wry, and lightly nourishing character study with a diptych structure that adds enigmatic intrigue to the proceedings.

Since Maïwenn created Jeanne for herself, it may seem paradoxical to state that she’s all wrong for it. Nevertheless, her broad performance is a consistently unfortunate case study in “whatever she thinks she’s doing, this isn’t it.”

Evil Does Not Exist is something different, starting out as a character study cum eco parable and morphing into an enigmatic nightmare.

The mostly low-key mode of Nowhere Special is the right one. Norton is spectacular, but little Lamont delivers one of those uncanny performances that doesn’t seem like acting, and makes you feel for the kid almost as much as his onscreen parent does.

While the action and suspense set pieces are executed with typical Ritchie bravura, the movie falls flat a lot of the time in between.

This is an engaging and watchable activist documentary that does make way for optimism in its last minutes, but doesn’t, um, sugarcoat its envoi about changing our eating ways: “Not only can we do it, we have to.”

Kim’s Video, co-directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin and narrated by Redmon, is less a retail history than a shaggy dog story. One that actually appears to be true. Go in knowing that and you might get a kick out of it.

Bonello’s not here to tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. He’s here to tell us to be afraid—be very afraid. What he delivers is not just a densely packed art movie but the most potent horror picture of the decade so far.

Perhaps paradoxically, it’s when the film is at its most quiet that it’s also most persuasive.

Though two hours long, the movie moves as swiftly as a greased ferret through a Habitrail and delivers hallucinatory action highs for its extended climax.

Burgess carries this succinct (and arguably slight, narratively disjointed) comedy without making you want to strangle his often willfully naïve character.

Limbo is entirely engrossing as it brings its discomfiting points home.

This is a terrific document and a testament.

In the end, even genre fans with relaxed standards might try to similarly rebel against this insipid offering.

The bag of ensuing twists in “Bring Him to Me” may not entirely redeem the clichés that made them possible, but they do keep one alert.

Despite its bona fides, the movies narrative and characterizations practically gorge on clichés.

On its surface, “Onlookers” is a movie that can be described very simply. For about an hour and twenty minutes, a series of very neatly composed shots depict natives of Laos and tourists observing a variety of sights and sites.

Land of Bad, directed by William Eubank from a script he wrote with David Frigerio, is commendable in the abstract for depicting the realities of 21st-century warfare both narratively and thematically.

The story told in “Out of Darkness” is ultimately sad more than terrifying, a parable about violence and the roots of human war. It’s an impressively credible and gnarly journey back in time.

True-crime doc watchers who are in committed relationships may see Lover, Stalker, Killer, a bracing account of a lurid series of misdeeds directed by Sam Hobkinson, and breathe a sigh of relief over being out of the dating pool.

The movie reminded me of what Peter Bogdanovich said of Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: that it "is not a young man’s movie; it has the wisdom and poetic perceptions of an artist knowingly nearing the end of his life and career." The wisdom and poetry here are just as real and just as thoroughly felt.

While the making of the song was partially detailed in its long-form video, there’s plenty of new, engaging, and sometimes eyebrow-raising anecdotal material here.

The one constant of life is change, and our own individual relations to the place we grew up, or came of age, in are invariably complicated not by just the alterations in the landscape but the way our perspectives shift...The Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho understands this feeling just as well as I and maybe you do, and he’s made a lovely, enveloping film about it, called “Pictures of Ghosts.”

The bare facts of Carter Cash’s story are such that the filmmakers would have had to really mess up to not produce a movie that entertains and moves a viewer to tears. “June,” rest assured, does the job well.

The viewer might strap themselves in for some life lessons. “Driving Madeleine” does serve them up, sure, but the film, written and directed by Christian Carion, is a lot more than a sentimental journey.

Few things in this laboriously quirky picture mesh at all.

An all-star roster of interviewees, including the luminaries Mel Tormé and Buddy Rich, contributes to an unfailingly entertaining saga.

In the end, Migration moves along at jet speed while often feeling labored.

Tedesco is the son of the West Coast guitar great Tommy Tedesco, and he clearly has a knack for getting musicians to open up. The band members.

Wenders chooses to illuminate indirectly, and to compel the viewer to concoct questions of their own.

This is the farthest thing in the cinematic firmament from a world-changer you can imagine, but as an evening’s entertainment, it’ll more than do.

The movie also provides a smart primer on the “New German Cinema” Herzog helped bring into being during the 1960s.

This is suspenseful and cathartic, and even the schmaltzy stuff is so distinctly John Woo that it’s welcome.

The filmmakers do seem frequently flummoxed by the scale of the narrative, and you get a sense of them trying to cram a lot into a two-hour running time.

Against the Tide, a documentary directed by Sarvnik Kaur, depicts environmental disaster with an intimate lens.

The holiday themes feel arbitrary and tacked on; one guesses the script was rescued from Curtis’s bottom drawer and spruced up with some Christmas fairy dust. The story, finally, is only about a man who learns the true meaning of punctuality.

The key to this movie’s winning emotional delicacy is its formal sturdiness. Every shot has a specific job to do and does it well. The performances are measured and restrained.

The sensibility behind “The Strangler” is sufficiently unusual and stalwart.

[Roth] knows his stuff and he’s very adept at serving up both gross-outs and real leap-from-your-seat moments.

Wang’s non-adherence to narrative lines deliberately prevents the sense of sustained drama. Still, every sequence has some emotional or dramatic hook to make it engaging.

The magic of movies does depend on a certain suspension of disbelief, but “Journey” tests the viewer beyond rational credulity, even as it persists in asserting the reality of its existence.

Fripp, an endlessly thoughtful and meticulously articulate guitarist, is the group’s most tireless and paradoxical explainer in the film.

Directed by Madeleine Gavin, Beyond Utopia is a bracing and frequently jaw-dropping look at, first and foremost, the discontented people of North Korea who attempt defections doggedly. It’s a more difficult trip than you’d probably imagine.

While neither particularly profound nor earth-shatteringly scary, Suitable Flesh is better than passable grisly horror fun in a very specific tradition.

Burr is skilled at this, for sure. And Woodbine and Cannavale, who are better actors overall, slide into Burr’s mode with ease. The results will prove satisfactory and maybe cathartic for his fans.

While the settings may indeed be beautiful, every frame here has been location-scouted and dressed to a fare-thee-well that sucks all the life out of every image—the viewer might also rest easy at the near-certain prospect that The Unfortunate Events will be conveyed as antiseptically and tastefully as possible.

Directed by Maggie Betts from a script she wrote with Doug Wright, The Burial develops into a lively courtroom drama with wide-ranging pertinence. Of course its two lead actors give the bravura performances you’d expect from them, but they don’t eat the scenery — they take the material seriously and invest in it with welcome nuance.

I Am a Noise, beginning with Baez actually consulting a voice coach as she prepares for what will be a “farewell tour” (it was undertaken in 2019 before COVID hit the world), is a coherent, cohesive, and sometimes jarringly frank portrait.

Story Ave is a portrait of an artist as a young man, a not-quite-coming-of-age tale, a narrative of escape but not abandonment. The outlines of the movie’s story are familiar, but Torres has resourcefulness, energy, and imagination to burn in how he tells it.

While the supporting cast is replete with performers we like to see — Debi Mazar, Larry Pine, and Thurman’s daughter, Maya Hawke, as a feminist artist — the script, in the end, does little to support them.

The web spun by The Origin of Evil arguably features one twist too many, but the viewer is in for more than a pound by the time it happens. Largely thanks to Calamy’s rock-solid performance.

The movie was directed by Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) and Jeff Malmberg (“Marwencol”), and is a tad more fanciful than their prior work. But fancy is a good fit for the Veecks, it turns out.

“That is the meaning of tribute. Not showing myself at all. There is no ‘me’ to begin with,” Sakurai, who is now 59, says at one point. This is a terrifying notion, but the movie doesn’t choose to run with it.

This cool, unhurried movie is firmly anchored by a spectacularly modulated performance by Caillee Speeney.

It’s disarming and lovely to see a spiritual growth parable rendered in Anderson’s jewel-box style. His delivery here is not willfully eccentric but gorgeously centered. Form underscores content in "Henry Sugar" in a most delightful way.

Salvador's movie wants to penetrate something elemental in the viewer; if you can give in to its vision in good faith, it might just do that for you.

This is the kind of movie Piaffe is: one that mostly poises its absurd surreality at the edge of what’s plausible in contemporary everyday life until it moves into unprecedented physical mutations.

The movie is most naturally a showcase for Efira, whose work as an unusual 17th-century nun in “Benedetta” demonstrated she could play dazzling and tormented with equal facility and who gets to work a similar range here.

Over the next 90-plus minutes, the canines drop as many F-bombs as Pacino did in “Scarface.” Then there are the scatological jokes, each one more outlandish than the last, none bearing the slightest tinge of wit or joy.