Jesse Hassenger

In its gentle, modest way, Aftersun might well break your heart.

In many ways, this is an Old Man movie — a slower late-period work by a filmmaker ruminating on his advancing age, and on the beloved classics he made as a younger guy. But it’s Scorsese’s version: pulsing with more life than most younger filmmakers, before giving way to stark, chilling regret.

While the movie’s amusing comedy bits are a little too slow for vintage screwball or farce, its love story has no such limitations. Astaire and Rogers sell their whole relationship through movement, on and off the dance floor.

Though Nickel Boys is at least in part about Black oppression and the suffering that comes along with it, Ross uses the movie’s point of view to avoid making a movie that turns that suffering into a marquee attraction or an endurance test.

Baker obviously loves most of his characters, and while Anora doesn’t necessarily give off warmth, spending so much of time in the visceral chill of a Coney Island winter, it regards the entire situation with nonjudgmental good humor and a touch of melancholy.

A lot of movies attempt to replicate the experience of a dream; this one situates itself right on the edge, whether ecstatic or delirious or stricken, of waking up.

It’s a fascinating spectacle in large part because Nolan isn’t especially Malickian at all (though at least that frame of reference might temporarily ease the overworked, underbaked Kubrick comparisons).

The miracle of Chalamet’s performance is that as brazen, indecent, and dishonest as Marty is, he makes a temporarily convincing case for himself as a thwarted athlete, rather than a crook with an athletic fixation.

This one’s The Irishman for anyone in dire need of new glasses.

Campion’s take on the Western is an elegant, sometimes unnerving accomplishment.

It deserves a big screen if possible, though; Bentley and Kwedar have made an enveloping movie, one that might more closely echo its obvious influences from the comfort of home. This is a movie that belongs out in the beautiful, terrible world.

Todd Haynes obviously loves rock and roll, which makes it all the more impressive that he’s spent his career making movies about key figures in its history while avoiding the usual lionizing cliches.

It doesn’t capture the full horror potential of climate change, rising floodwaters, or even bloodthirsty sharks. But the filmmakers sure throw themselves into the fray with enthusiasm.

The movie’s dedication to girls everywhere is unnecessary; it already feels so specific and true without it.

The filmmaking itself is often witty, finding gags in whip-crack editing and shifts in perspective.

Just getting to see McDormand and Washington assay these famous parts makes this Macbeth worth preserving for posterity, alongside Fences in the Denzel Washington Giants Of Theatre section. But Coen’s equivalent of a solo album has its own virtuosic style.

The Color Purple is involving on a scene-to-scene basis, but it has a processional quality. Though it’s less constrained than Spielberg’s sometimes sentimentalized version of the material, the new movie isn’t less sentimental – or less thirsty for audience approval.

This is a striking introduction to Donaldson’s unflinching eye.

The younger characters are so full of life, and the older ones so full of trenchant but predictable talking-point issues, that it sometimes feels like a middling movie encroaching on a good one.

Playmobil: The Movie isn’t as funny as some of the direct-to-video Lego-related movies, either, and that’s very much the field it competes in, theatrical release or not. As children’s entertainment goes, this is a harmless distractor, but it’s also poorly conceived at every story turn, unable to even stick to a particular generic message to make up for its extremely basic humor.

The film’s other performances aren’t as engaging as Seydoux and young Martins, which means One Fine Morning itself sometimes feels like it’s muddling through with Sandra’s same weariness, too faithfully reproducing the repetitions of real life.

Though little about the technical skill of Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero brings to mind Spielberg, it’s hard not to think of "War Horse."

"Boyhood" has the natural endpoint of its lead growing into a young adult, while Girlhood stretches out in front of Marieme, an uncertain path into a haze.

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins doesn’t reach the giddy, earnest heights of something like Aquaman or a Wachowski project. It methodically sets up sequels—to be recast and released around 2030, judging by the Joes’ cinematic track record so far. But the dubiousness of its present-day achievement, the sheer ludicrousness of making the best G.I. Joe movie in 2021, is part of the dumbfounding fun.

At times, The Wild Robot feels almost elegiac – or is that just what happens when DreamWorks drops their worst habits and dedicates themselves to serving as a genuine creative competitor to their old rivals at Disney.

At times, Rogue Agent feels reluctant to fully engage in the kind of deception that might make it a trickier, more “fun” piece of work; it’s almost too tasteful for its own good.

Without slackening its tension, Black Bag sometimes resembles a bitter comedy of manners, which are apparently also kept in the black bag for certain stretches. These are people who like to tell each other what they find irretrievably boring, especially if it’s each other, whether or not they’re even telling the truth about their disdain.

Sinners, which the filmmaker himself has been touting as his first wholly original feature (Fruitvale Station, his debut, was based on a real-life tragedy), is both Coogler’s most fantastical and most closely rooted in the history of American racism. It’s pulp from the heart and the gut.

Wilde’s film gets a lot of comic mileage from its lead actors’ ability to create a funny, believable relationship. Feldstein and Dever are both terrific in it.

As they often do, Tomlin and Fonda make their material look sharper than it really is.

In traditional terms, it could simply be described as a tearjerker. Like Buckley’s performance, though, it’s richer than that, a cross between an out-of-body experience and a full-body sob. Some will likely resist it on those grounds, understandably. But, again, framing our reactions with the feelings of others is rarely a good idea, and despite its moments of faltering, Hamnet hits like an emotional wrecking ball—devastating as it clears its path.

This is Laika’s least droll, least ghoulish feature so far; the plotting is even more dreamlike than "Coraline."

Though this series is built on comic looseness, it’s that sincerity that carries through its minor comedic missteps, like underusing Hall and leaning too heavily on Cedric’s wacky-old-man shtick.

Hamaguchi’s film – and the performance style of Omika, a Hamaguchi crew member moving into acting here – is too controlled to produce an anguished tragedy out of this material, but it’s too unsparing to offer an easy exit.

The many great scenes in Janet Planet underscore the frustrations of its few bad ones: Even an emotionally tumultuous childhood can be a lot more absorbing than the indulgences of the adult world.

Saint Maud feels like a closed system, more designed than fully felt. Its moments of ecstasy are never as thrilling nor frightening as they should be.

Don’t Think Twice is the rare movie that’s immersed in improv as a subject, not a behind-the-scenes technique for goosing laughs.

Creed works far better than it should, and does so twice: as the unexpected payoff to a nearly 40-year-old series, and as the confirmation of a major talent in its director.

Even if C’mon C’mon occasionally feels like navel-gazing, it’s too open-hearted and generous of spirit to miss.

The tension between Boyle’s restless energy and Sorkin’s tendency to run in place drives the movie.

For a movie that emulates literature, The Age Of Adaline never fits comfortably into a particular form — literary or cinematic.

Well into his late period, Campbell still knows his way around a crisp cut, but sometimes that’s most noticeable in Cleaner when he’s not directing action at all – which is a surprising amount of the time.

It never pushes far enough into that territory to distinguish its beautiful losers from the many addiction-movie characters that precede them.

Weapons is masterfully entertaining and far more ambitious than Barbarian, and it feels more personal in the abstract. It more closely resembles a collage of nightmares than the expertly calibrated rollercoaster ride of Cregger’s previous film. But there’s something elusive about Weapons, too, meaning that — to stick with Fincher comparisons — the movie lands somewhere between Seven’s blunt-force didacticism and Zodiac’s sophisticated ghostliness.

The lack of dialogue makes Shaun The Sheep easy for younger children all over the world to understand, and the film is undeniably intended for that demographic.

On either end of Harvey’s adventure, Captains Courageous goes on a bit too long; the circumstances of his boarding-school transgressions are needlessly overcomplicated, and the emotional denouement is less than concise. But the seafaring section that makes up the majority of the film is well-crafted and gives way to surprising emotion.

In the end, McKay’s edu-tainment tactics work, even if the laughs aren’t as hearty as his broader work with Ferrell. The Big Short pulls off its own oddball gambit: grabbing attention through fringe wonkiness rather than a tantalizing glimpse at bro-banker lifestyles.

Occasionally, the movie’s combination of formula and tweaks makes it play like a one-blockbuster-fits-all reconciliation of a standard Disney checklist with a second list of corrective measures. For the most part, though, the movie feels more heartfelt than calculated.

It’s hard to feel energized by a historical epic finding a couple of ways to look cool for a few minutes at a time. Most of The King is just unadorned semi-prestige, with a few gruesome severed heads rolling around for cred.

This film isn’t a particularly astute portrayal of war, but it does ably depict sacrifice — something ultimately missing from the movie-star restoration of Top Gun: Maverick. Comparing the two movies isn’t especially fair, but it’s still worth noting that this smaller production is doing more with less.

With eleven different characters to serve—not counting several animal sidekicks—A New Age has a lot going on in terms of plot and action, with a litany of new alliances, betrayals, and team-ups. But the sequel is not as visually sophisticated as its predecessor.

Setting aside more particular genre trappings, Mangold re-engineers one of his unfussy studio throwbacks into a supersized Dad Movie event.

Whether through experience or intuition, Rianda and Rowe clearly understand animated comedy from the inside out; the gags stretch and snap as readily as the family tensions.

It’s a neat surprise that DaCosta extracts more dark humor from the series than Boyle himself.

You can feel The Flash wishing it could steal a glimpse into the audience and revise itself on the fly accordingly; no wonder early screenings apparently hedged on an ending until the last possible minute.

The movie evokes retro genre coziness and unease in equal measure, one creeping up from beneath the other.

Working with fellow directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, Gibney has delivered a swiftly paced chronicle of history in the making, rich in both immediacy and uncertainty.

American Honey doesn’t rise and fall on the strength of its love story, if that’s even what happens between Star and Jake. Arnold touches on a lot—rural poverty in America, class divisions, the impulsiveness and recklessness of youth—but never tames her film into a strict polemic.

Despite Seydoux’s uniquely magnetic ennui – could any other contemporary actress imbue a beautifully bored model with such empathy? — and MacKay’s gameness to bring a little nuance to a real creep in the 2014 section, The Beast has an undercurrent of restlessness, maybe even listlessness.

Henson saw potential in Spinney that he proceeded to realize over the course of many years. I Am Big Bird only has 90 minutes to cover the basics.

Fincher’s movie about movies seems to be about attempting to work within a system that’s encompassing enough to impose itself on fantasies and reality alike.

The result is a movie that seems more interested in instruction and reassurance than pushing at or playing with sexual kinks. In other words, it’s ultimately about as sexy and unpredictable as a corporate performance review.

Cop-supremacy pulp may be hard to revive with a straight face; the laugh-a-minute spoof, though, is momentarily and gloriously back.

Medel and Kuhling both give remarkably even-keeled performances, making their differences clear without a lot of voice-raising.

Throughout all the chatter, some naturalistically repetitive and some more philosophical, is a sense of characters searching, whether that’s communicated through acting advice, relationships to vices (“How can it be bad for you? It’s just food”) or musings on the shortness of life.

A little of this debunking is cute (“I got nothing against bib overalls or straw hanging out of your mouth,” one of the subjects clarifies about the myths he wants to dispel); the rest of it feels defensive.

After noble and varied entries like "Jack Reacher," "Hell Or High Water," and "The Old Man & The Gun," The Highwaymen is a crucial reminder that good Dad Movies aren’t as easy to make as they look.

Plenty of crime capers end ruefully, but few feel this potently bittersweet.

Sweeney’s film, his second high-achieving, high-wire act in a row, lives on the line between yearning and helpless fixation.

It’s hard to fault Puzzle for going in a more rigorous, serious-minded direction... until it trudges in that direction with such repetition. Turtletaub and his screenwriters lay the borderline-anachronistic details of their heroine’s oppressive life on so thick that the movie starts to sag.

Though Coppola may be singing a familiar song, it rings with clarity and purpose, and unlike most biopics, it does not outstay its welcome.

Oddity is simultaneously an impressive production and a bizarre lesson in the vagaries of fear: without visibly shifting its tactics, it can be shiver-inducing in a few scenes and tedious in others.

The small miracle of Leslye Headland’s second film as writer-director is not that it sidesteps its influences or shuns its genre. It’s that it somehow makes the lusty undercurrents of its male/female friendship unironically romantic and, at times, unapologetically sexy.

Despite the sci-fi trimmings—or, really, in perfect sync with them—the anxiety After Yang generates has the gentle, humming pervasiveness of real life. It’s trying its best to tell us about the world.

Everything’s Going to Be Great just has characters and ideas waiting in the wings to rush in nonsensically.

Like Disney’s "Big Hero 6," the movie is busy, but not breathless with invention.

Sorry To Bother You is often wildly funny, and if its broad arc is familiar stuff about a down-on-his-luck everyman experiencing success but at what cost, at least the plot specifics are unpredictable by dint of Riley’s imagination.

Mr. Holmes has moments of palpable regret and loss, but visually speaking, it looks like a blandly touching movie about a lonely old man who befriends a scrappy kid and learns about the magic of storytelling. Eventually, that’s the unexciting destiny it fulfills.

Soderbergh isn’t exactly hiding a secret drama inside his barrel of laughs and twists. But his comeback project keeps quiet about being one of the sweetest, most affirming movies he’s ever made.

Nosferatu is a hell of a picture. If Eggers often appears to be reaching as far back as possible for his cinematic influences, riffing on a silent movie allows him – forces him, even – to reveal his more modern sensibilities, where men are repped by the contorted, strangled scream face of Hoult and the ineffectual Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose wife Anna (Emma Corrin) is this story’s version of Lucy from Dracula. In a plague-ridden town, it’s Ellen’s visionary, full-tilt fever that allows her to more closely commune with the evil around her, maybe even finding a hint of sick ecstasy. Nosferatu, in its enveloping-shadow way, finds more than a hint.

When it keys into Mamie’s horrifying experience, and the way she refuses to retreat from it, Chukwu and Deadwyler pack a wallop.

The Dark Horse may not entirely work as a film, but it has an unexpected amount of gritty idiosyncrasy on its side.

It’s a movie about a toxic relationship that digs into the harrowing psychological details of mental and verbal abuse without exploiting it. It’s also a single-minded PSA picture — indie portraiture with hardly any identifying details filled in.

Ritchie’s film is less infatuated with displays of All-American bodily sacrifice than movies like Lone Survivor and 13 Hours, but it still keys into a kind of performative, manly anguish.

It’s a testament to the wealth of this material that the point is a passing one — just one incidence of institutional hypocrisy among many.

Presence has the story, limited scope, and 85-minute runtime of a 1940s B-picture, infused—as those pictures often were, and as his crime movies usually are—with a disciplined style and contemporary electricity. It’s budget Gothic that’s worth every penny and then some.

It’s pleasantly baffling to discover that not only is Hotel Transylvania 3 easily the best film of the series, but it also feels more at home thematically on a cruise ship than its predecessors did at a haunted Transylvanian castle.

At times, Relic reaches something like lyricism, which lifts a bleak horror movie above hopeless wallowing. The movie isn’t so much doomy or depressing as it is clear-eyed and resolute about its own horrors.

Past Winterbottom films have turned “real life” into both comedy and tragedy. The Face Of An Angel turns it into a directionless skulk.

Leo looks like the kind of standard big-studio animation Netflix has been regularly knocking off, but it’s far funnier, and more unexpectedly sweet, than the average kid-targeted cartoon. In fact, Robert Smigel, Adam Sandler, and their collaborators have made one of the funniest movies of the year that doubles as a love letter to the complexities of teaching kids, in or out of the classroom.

Pryor has a lot of funny moments in Blue Collar, especially in the first half or so, when the movie tends toward angry comedy.

Despite its upstart distributor and relatively low-key cast, it’s an unabashedly mainstream movie; compared with edgier, more indie versions of onscreen American youth, it might even look a little pat.

As with the first film, the look of 28 Years Later is key to its effectiveness.

Simon Rex gives a virtuoso performance.

But if Their Finest is a little stodgy and tasteful, it also possesses Scherfig’s trademark wistfulness.

There’s little of the intimacy of Bahrani’s best work, and while the book has been described as dark-humored, the movie feels more like a typical prestige adaptation, hitting the key themes and scenes without finding an independent tone. Despite its obvious currency, it’s more yesterday than tomorrow.

Lopez indulges a different form of movie-star vanity than simply making herself over as an unstoppable woman of action. The movie pretends to conceal her mothering sensitivity, but it’s actually flaunting the same maudlin old-man sentimentality that drives so many Liam Neeson vehicles, minus the genuine anguish Neeson can usually summon on cue.

Rebel Ridge isn’t a lecture on civil asset forfeiture; it’s as elementally satisfying as a great Western. That’s really the genre Saulnier lands on here, complete with a moral clarity about its violence.