Glenn Kenny

Michal Clayton shares a number of affinities with Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's "Network." Wilkinson's got the so-mad-he's-sane Peter Finch position; while Swinton embodies a sexless, neurotic, overstressed variant of Faye Dunaway's character. Which leaves Clooney as the (considerably younger) William Holden of the piece. And, yes, he makes the most of it.

The substantial pleasures of the movie are supplemented by the gratification of seeing an emerging talent with concerns far outside the conventional indie realm asserting himself with such authority.

The movie culminates in a cinematic coup de grâce bold enough to spin your head — one that gives the movie an entirely new dimension.

There’s more going on in this movie’s 90-plus minutes than in many summer blockbusters nearly twice its length.

This film is informative and often fascinating.

Thanks to Mr. de Sousa’s superb performance, the movie often convincingly portrays not just the exploited condition of laborers such as Cristiano, but the nagging sadness of life itself.

Unfortunately, the reach of The Return exceeds its grasp, and so this film of gruffly beautiful images didn't put a hook in me the way Zvyagintsev so ardently seems to want it to. [March 2003, p. 27]

“Recorder” doesn’t explore the extent to which Marion’s original project of analysis was subsumed by the compulsion to tape everything. But her taping of everything created an irreproducible archive that is enlightening and the stuff of madness.

This restless film is hardly content to present a portrait of an icon, instead insisting, with compassion and clear eyes, that icons are all too human too.

This documentary portrait of the formidable sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard is, by dint of its brevity, more tantalizing than satiating. But it’s still a welcome cinematic account of her work.

As an arraignment of the systems that ultimately rule human interaction regardless of the superficial societal differences between Europe, the Americas, and the East, A Hero is a chilling demonstration of how, as the song says, money changes everything.

The point of it all being that history and poetry are not possible without personified antimonies, real or imagined. Neruda does not make this point in any particularly convincing way, despite excellent performances by Luis Gnecco as the title character, a stolid Gael Garcia Bernal as his pursuer, and Mercedes Morán as Delia.

Make no mistake: this is a horror film; as you stare at the screen, the abyss it represents stares back at you.

While the movie steers around the details of how post-fame Sacks became something of a brand, it beautifully presents a portrait of his compassion and bravery.

The film’s success is directly dependent on the personalities — and achievements — of the young women highlighted. Despite the narrative gaps, Ms. Lipitz excels at putting across those personalities.

It's churlish, especially these days, to try to split the difference between an immortal comedy classic and a mere laugh riot.

The movie balances amiable humor and standard believe-in-yourself bromides with better than average action sequences.

A rather fun Nick Cave movie might not have been on your 2022 bingo card, but here we are.

If a woman had not in fact certifiably written the picture, I might have thought that Lester Bangs had come back from the dead to pen an account of the teen years of his ideal mate.

There’s such a disconcerting rush of lush imagery and action in the first 40 minutes or so of “Invisible Life” that one is apt to wonder whether there’s any kind of focused narrative. But the casual misdirection is setting the viewer up for an emotional kill.

Though the movie is predictable, it's also honest; Fin emerges from his struggles a better person but not A Better Person, if you catch my drift. And in any case all of the actors are a great pleasure to watch.

[A] cogent, fascinating portrait of the artist.

The story is not without interest, and it touches on a couple of worthwhile themes: cultural erasure and the way religious and provincial prejudices can suppress love. But its treatment of these subjects is perhaps undercut by its conventionality.

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

The movie raises disquieting questions, including a few that Mr. Mansky might not have meant to.

With its frequent dramatizations, zippy editing, and song-driven soundtrack, Three Identical Strangers may be said to indulge in the most potentially egregious of mainstreaming devices used in contemporary documentaries. Yet because the story itself is so, well, juicy, and the subjects one-time pop culture phenoms, the approach feels acceptable if not entirely “right.”

You may believe you know Turner’s tale. And you may be right. It is retold well here, but the most moving portions — and they could bring tears to your eyes — come as Turner, almost 80 at the time of this interview (and as beautiful as she has ever been), wearing a tailored black suit, sits and discusses where she’s at now.

A Man Called Otto is not only more bloated than the Swedish film, it’s more outré, in a way that’s hard to pin down.

The film spaces out several nasty and effective frights. And as its narrative seems to deliberately devolve into a dissociative dream, even the funny material hits with a choke in the throat.

Deeply nuts and exhaustingly hilarious.

The movie is a fascinating portrait that is if anything too brief.

It really is quite a movie: entertaining and engaging, but also mortifying; a good alternate title might be "American Horror Story."

I was so invested with Jong-gu and his family that as the suspense, violence and worse ratcheted up, I was not merely scared, but heartbroken. An overly literal bit of business at the end slightly undermines the film. As a whole, though, The Wailing is the hard stuff. Handle with care.

A martial-arts movie landmark, as strong in its performances as it is spectacularly novel in its violence.

This is a fascinating and pertinent tale, but one major aspect of its telling gives me serious pause.

This Hairspray really is a lot of fun -- colorful, sassy, and brisk.

I say this as someone for whom the very idea of a Kong remake is sacrilege, Jackson's straitened conception yields up a pretty damn good popcorn movie.

The result is an emotionally wringing film, equally effective in the narrative and tone-poem departments.

A War, as tough to watch as it can be, is an extremely rewarding and disquieting experience.

The movie, directed by Antonio Tibaldi and Alex Lora, is quiet and quietly moving and quite different from “Hoarders” in its steady pace and poetic vérité style.

As a music industry story, Kenny G’s rise, engineered by the mogul Clive Davis but at times bucked by the artist himself, is fascinating.

Damon is superb in the kind of role he excels at: a man of integrity who gets steered off the path and is subsequently righted. Lest all of this sound heavy, I should assure you that Ford v Ferrari is exactly as fun, maybe even more fun, than its well-put-together trailer makes it out to be.

Almodóvar has created a dense, audacious film in which layers of cinematic artifice lovingly camouflage (at least for a while) its characters’ dark, damaged heart.

Today, Duritz is a reflective figure. The documentary, directed by Amy Scott, will pull you back from any “pity the poor celebrity” eye-rolling with its revelation of his struggles with mental illness, which he endured, undiagnosed, during the ups and downs of early fame.

Performed with absolute commitment by its cast (Justin Salinger and Ella Smith play the younger versions of the title characters), Ray & Liz is a quietly harrowing movie. Billingham risks tedium, though, in withholding anything like an inner life for any of its characters until the movie’s very end.

A documentary that serves a vital function. Ricky Gervais notwithstanding, this disease is no joke, and it’s not going to be addressed as the scourge that it is until a larger portion of the population gets that. This movie should help.

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.

The Sparks Brothers, an energetic documentary directed by Edgar Wright, explains their appeal in part by emphasizing how it cannot be explained.

Coup 53 is worth seeing, but its general effect on this viewer was to seek out more books, rather than movies, on the subject. Which I suppose is something.

Mr. Trengove shoots the film in intimate wide-screen, getting in close to the performers as their characters tamp down explosive feelings, often letting the spectacular landscapes behind them break down into soft-focus abstractions. His direction is perfectly judged up to and including the shudder-inducing ending.

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.

Upon taking in the gorgeousness — and it is really something; the production design of this movie, by Luca Tranchino, is exceptional (as is Daniel Aranyó’s cinematography, which shines when he’s shooting in the natural world) —Lillie observes, “It’s like being inside God’s thoughts.”

Ira Sachs is one of American cinema’s most reliable crafters of human-scaled cinematic dramas. That description doesn’t sound too terribly exciting, so I should assure you that Passages is some kind of time at the movies—a briskly-moving, turbulent, emphatically sexy, deliberately exasperating love triangle in crazy times.

Gleason is incredibly frank about Gleason’s physical suffering and the toll his terrifyingly implacable physical deterioration takes on his marriage.

This documentary, directed by Jeffrey Wolf, is a plain, sincere, nourishing account of the artist.

The film, directed by Roland Vranik from a script by Mr. Vranik and Ivan Szabo, is a careful, compassionate and beautifully acted character drama with a social conscience.

The result is a story that’s hair-raisingly watchable and frequently moving, regardless of what you believe you might already know of Wilson’s life.

The film’s images entangle us with the characters, which makes its indeterminate ending a little more disappointing than it might have been. But this post-cataclysm habitat is worth paying a visit anyway.

Wiseman himself is also the last person who’d call his films “objective,” because they’re not. It’s more that their point of view is multi-faceted, sophisticated, connoting a point of view that’s deeply felt but not on-the-nose obvious.

A very unusual and rare kind of movie: one that is good in spite of itself. Which isn’t to say that the movie’s director and co-producer Tony Stone doesn’t make some provocative, interesting choices.

The result is a kind of very faux documentary style, which, along with the subject matter, has suggested to some the influence of the BBC television series "The Office." Von Trier says he's never seen an episode, and I believe him.

As is customary in Mr. Baumbach’s pictures, the acting is spectacular.

The measured ordinariness of its first section has been a sly setup for a poetic film that handles narrative as a kind of scarf dance.

One of the many things that White Riot, a documentary about RAR directed by Rubika Shah, brings home is that the world could still use more somethings against racism.

This is an essential film, but it is also a terribly dispiriting one.

This tense and upsetting film has more psychological depth and empathy than the comparable sensationalist fare of its time, and shudder-inducing cinematic style to spare. Private Property qualifies as a genuine rediscovery.

Documentaries about film technology, at least those that aspire to reach some portion of a mainstream audience, have to make wonkiness ingratiating. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, a cogent and winning picture directed by Midge Costin, does this in a variety of ways.

The measured tone with which the movie presents its ostensible revelations is more than half the fun; nothing that comes up is ever played as a twist; the aforementioned opening scene shows Munch’s hand deliberately.

Ms. Huppert’s presence — steady, warm, thoughtful but with a casual air — keeps the entire enterprise classically comedic.

The movie’s wide-screen framing, ruthless plot reversals and say-what-you-mean writing sometimes recall a master of socially conscious cinema from another era, Sam Fuller. But this is a picture with its own strong voice.

If this is in fact merely a longer Simpsons episode, it's a damn good Simpsons episode.

If you’re a scholar of comedy, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, a concise doc about the founding, life, thriving, and death of the '70s-defining satirical magazine, is likely a must-see. It’s an engaging and entertaining film, filled with funny anecdotes expertly related.

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.

An observation that when you’re running away, it doesn’t matter where you’re running to as much as it matters where you’re running from. “Compartment No. 6” has an always energetic sense of place even when it’s keeping to the confined space of its title room. Combined with the committed acting, it makes for a worthwhile journey.

Taormina purposefully dresses his cast and designs their environment in a way that throws them into a sort of temporal never-never land. He achieves a number of other startling effects in this impressive movie, which sheds its naturalism slowly as it embraces a surrealism that’s both disquieting and poignant.

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

The details of the story, as they unfold, do not correspond with any dimension of reality. Character development is nonexistent. The sluggish rhythms, the awkward cuts, the unlovely cinematography cohere into what seems like the enactment of a pointless dream.

The movie biz inside jokes eventually yield to fairly merciless plumbings about the construction of the self, resulting in a kind of philosophical discomfort that's much different from the run-of-the-mill humiliations this sort of thing usually trucks in.

David Strathairn, playing Murrow, follows his writers' lead beautifully, delivering a performance that's all understatement on the surface and searing fire underneath.

This is a purely sensationalistic cinematic experience that paradoxically encourages reflection and contemplation.

Because Eklof’s approach is formally very clean, showing some genuine, intriguing detachment, I’m apt to prefer it to Seidl’s work. But not by much.

Clouds of Sils Maria is oodles more poetic and enigmatic than the term “backstage drama” generally encompasses.

Diverting and often funny enough, largely thanks (as is not unusual in cases like this) to its cast.

The Endless rewards patience with mind-bending twists and turns.

The Other Side of the Wind is a very rich film and a very difficult one. I’ve seen it nearly three times now and what I intuit about the aspects of it that “work,” and those where the seams just show too nakedly shift all the time.

Malkovich is more interested in hitting notes of elegiac lyricism than delivering socko action; this is a thriller that means to get under your skin rather than make you leap from your seat.

Wildlife is a domestic drama both sad and terrifying. The entire cast does exceptional work (Oxenbould is an exciting find), but the movie is anchored by Mulligan, who gives the best performance of any I’ve seen in film this year.

It’s a dizzying tale. And whether or not you believe “Salvator Mundi” to be a real Leonardo, it’s ultimately a disgusting one.

A sturdy, watchable character drama.

Wife of a Spy is something like linear narrative perfection, with every scene perfectly calibrated.

I think the most productive way to look at Mank, a new film about Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s, and about the screenwriter of a particularly famous and iconic work, is to understand it as Fincher’s most playful work.

By turns harrowing and stirring, it’s a shame-inducing history lesson that never feels like a lecture.