Justin Chang

The new film is both Akin’s strongest and, with its stately, picturesque classicism, his least characteristic work in some time.

For me, the possible false note lay not in Aramayo’s performance but in the script. At times, it seems that Jones’s film, far from being strictly diagnostic, might in fact be egging John on, for the sake of our entertainment, toward perverse new heights of verbal invention.

Kawamura and Hirase seem to have perceived the immersive limitations of the movie medium—and, rather than fighting those limitations, adapted their story accordingly. What they’ve emerged with is the rare picture that feels at once true to and ultimately subversive of its source.

The invasion in this movie is neither an assault nor a threat; it’s an invitation to open doors and let fresh inspiration in.

The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes.

Hoppers is a hoot but also a more soulful film than some will give it credit for. It knows that, for humans and animals alike, seeing and understanding are one and the same.

Herzog, for his part, remains firmly interested in both nature and man. His camera is enthralled by the animals that occasionally steal into the frame: a venomous spider, covered by its equally dangerous young, gets a frightening cameo. But what absorbs him most is the intense kinship that the San feel with the elephants.

In Pompei: Below the Clouds, Rosi is as quietly watchful as ever, though he is either remarkably skilled or remarkably fortunate in finding individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, can stand in for his own.

There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill.

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is certainly something to behold. I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel.

The movie develops these ideas, with thrillingly demented showmanship, into a doozy of a third act, built on two cleverly intertwined cases of mistaken identity.

The workplace dramas intended to animate Hind’s story wind up distracting from it.

Dabis embraces the conventions of melodrama with sombre grace. As a director, she orchestrates scenes of separation, discord, and shattering loss with an emotional restraint that’s equally evident in the way she plays the role of Hanan.

I confess that I was held so spellbound by Fastvold’s musical flights of fancy—and by the attendant sweep and muscularity of her filmmaking—that I felt let down by the more prosaic moments, when everyone doesn’t erupt into song and dance.

Magellan isn’t an action movie; it’s a consequence movie. But Diaz, within all this meticulous subtraction, adds dramatic heft and political meaning.

The Dardennes haven’t made their usual thriller of conscience; they know that their characters have several possible choices, none of them perfect, but more than one of them conceivably right. If the film’s interplay of stories tilts toward the schematic, it also encourages us to look past the straightforward trappings of realism and discern a deeper structure of rhyme and rhythm.

Resurrection, a magnificent intoxicant of a movie from the thirty-six-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is no ordinary love letter to cinema. It’s more like a love labyrinth—a multi-tiered maze, full of secret passages, shadowy rooms, and winding staircases, with a giant movie theatre, sculpted from candle wax, waiting at the incandescent finish.

[Park] brings out the story’s flashes of dark comedy and gives them the lavish, over-the-top exuberance of farce.

Is This Thing On? isn’t a dishy, insider’s view of the New York comedy scene, and it isn’t trying to be. It knows that its best material lies elsewhere.

It marks an unstable new mode for Zhao, a weave of subdued pastoral realism and forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism. The movie whispers poetic sublimities in your ear one minute and tosses its prestige ambitions in your face the next.

The Berlin-born director Mascha Schilinski, who wrote the screenplay with Louise Peter, is a bit of a prankster herself. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a filmmaker wield the tools of her craft with such an ingenious and committed sense of mischief.

By the time Dorothy and her friends march on Elphaba’s lair, there seems to be something more pernicious than mere mediocrity at work. It’s as if the picture were so cowed by its iconic predecessor that it could only respond with a petulant urge to destroy the classic it could never be.

The movie begins in exhilaration and concludes in despair, and what unfolds in between is an experience of singularly turbulent and transfixing power; for sheer visceral excitement and sustained emotional force, I haven’t encountered its equal this year. It’s an extraordinarily propulsive piece of filmmaking, and every moment of it is suffused with feeling.

Sandler isn’t doing a strained meta riff on his persona; he’s playing an honest-to-God character, plagued by stress, uncertainty, and an unfashionably big heart. There’s art to his performance, and no shortage of life.

Reinsve, who made such a radiant scatterbrain in “Worst Person,” seems incapable of an inexpressive note, and “Sentimental Value” leans as hard on her overflowing responsiveness as it does on Skarsgård’s irascible charm.

Del Toro’s empathy for the Creature is total—and so, owing to the aching poignancy and underlying rage of Elordi’s performance, is ours.

This movie offers an uncommonly pleasurable descent into hell, and for that reason, I suspect, it will elude the criticisms that have been flung at two other recent provocations, Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” and Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” both of which likewise sneered at performative politics and were attacked as noxiously reactionary.

It is, bluntly and unabashedly, rip-roaring entertainment, propelled by flurries of comedy, bursts of emotion, and sidelong jolts of social critique.

Byrne the actor turns out to be stretchable in the best sense; her performance is a marvel of tragicomic elasticity. Whatever she’s doing at any given moment—rolling her eyes, sleepily mumbling instructions into her phone, dragging herself down a hallway in a haze, or releasing her frustration in a barely muffled scream—she has the rare ability to seem at once psychologically stripped down and physically invigorated by the unyielding scrutiny of the camera.

The movie, which posits an impending nuclear strike on a major American city, is a flimsy yet high-minded piece of doomsday schlock, largely populated by ciphers in suits and drained of the pulp pleasures that schlock, at its best, can afford.

After the Hunt will be derided as little more than an intellectual parlor trick, a flimsy house of cards. I wouldn’t disagree, but few directors build more luxurious houses than Guadagnino does, whatever the materials.

One Battle After Another, as great an American movie as I’ve seen this year, doesn’t simply meet the moment; with extraordinary tenderness, fury, and imagination, it forges a moment all its own, and insists that better ones could still lie ahead.

Mescal’s good-humored watchfulness and contemplative calm make the character a companionable presence, even as the filmmaking ultimately succumbs to inertia and the great, defining passion of Lionel’s life recedes into the mists of memory.

It’s hard not to conclude that, in the case of “Eden,” Howard simply isn’t mean enough for this material. His temperament is better suited to stories of heroic resilience than ones of greed, bloodlust, and cynical isolationism.

Covino’s technique, for all its finesse, has a mechanistic quality that soon turns deadening. The movie is less a screwball comedy than a screwball contraption—a madcap farce that the screenwriters have reduced to a math problem.

A Little Prayer is spare yet brisk, and it unfolds with a graceful, almost musical sense of modulation: Camp and Weston, both veterans of MacLachlan’s work, strike bracing high notes of acerbic wit, which Strathairn and Levy answer with an understated bass line of emotion.

Loktev’s accomplishment in this extraordinarily human cinematic document is to simply keep filming—to cling fast to her camera, and to keep it focussed on the remarkable sight of young people showing exemplary courage. In doing so, she keeps faith with the words of another speaker, pledging solidarity with dissidents everywhere: “Evil is not eternal, and truth will surely win.”

The film’s considerable power depends entirely on its moment-to-moment persuasiveness, on a set of narrative and aesthetic choices that, as presented—in a series of swift, kinetically composed, and jaggedly edited scenes—seldom feel like choices at all.

Really, the problem with Eddington is not that Aster judges his characters. It’s that he barely finds them interesting enough to judge, and his boredom proves infectious.

Even amid the loud, incessant pop of gunfire, Kurosawa avoids monotony; he has a knack for embedding ideas within action, and for developing action in ways that trigger yet more ideas.

The actors provide the nuances, with stirring grace: just as Taylor-Johnson tempers Jamie’s own alpha machismo with a gentle, unfeigned paternal tenderness, so the extraordinary Comer gives Isla, even at her most despairing, an astonishing toughness of body, mind, and spirit.

Again and again, “F1” finds fresh pathways into familiar material; it keeps its surface-level moves unpredictable even though its overarching trajectory isn’t.

Familiar Touch, its title perhaps a tacit acknowledgment of how well-worn this terrain is, illuminates its protagonist’s condition with uncommon concision and grace, and with few of the formal and narrative strategies we’ve come to expect.

I don’t buy it, Jane Austen wouldn’t buy it, and deep down I don’t think Song buys it. In attempting to merge escapist pleasures with financial realities, Materialists trips up on its own high-mindedness.

A movie needn’t be a work of art—and "The Final Reckoning," the baggiest, least satisfying film of the McQuarrie quartet, falls well short of the mark.

It suggests not just a subversion but a putrefaction of the Ruddy-comedy genre—a portrait of male loneliness so totalizing, and so scarily close to the bone, that laughs and screams all but bleed together.

The film’s precise juxtapositions of sight and sound produce brilliant flashes of insight, cascading specifics of texture and emotional coloration, and a cumulatively seductive, almost musical flow.

It’s the warmth of Gladstone’s presence that leaves a lasting impression and endows this remake—with all its reshufflings, inspired or strained—with a whisper of something authentically new.

The movie is, paradoxically, both artifact and construct; the instability of the image is precisely what holds it together. Jia’s sense of the ephemerality of the medium, and of the world that the medium reflects, has seldom been more stirringly profound.

Kulumbegashvili’s gaze is by turns coolly diagnostic and furiously exploratory, a dichotomy that manifests itself in the compositional extremes of Khachaturan’s cinematography.

Even when purporting to tell his own story, Cronenberg cannot help but leave us with something more expansively unsettling.

Warfare, you come to discover, is waging a war of its own—against the glamorizing tendencies and readily digestible classical conventions of its genre.

Việt and Nam is a series of excavations, and, for all its gentle cadences—a shot of jungle leaves rustling in the wind about approximates the story’s rhythm—it seems to unearth new mysteries and paradoxes by the minute.

It moves between cities and centuries, and teasingly undermines the relationship between sound and image, with a sly and miraculous fluidity.

Toward the end, though, this dubious, shapeless patchwork of a movie does achieve a strange, halting power—by making an inquiry into the nature of power itself.

Tasked with reinterpreting one of the most frightening and emblematic villains in the Disney canon, Gadot evinces no feel for malevolent cunning, or even knowing cynicism; smacked down repeatedly by her Magic Mirror, she can barely conjure a decently icy glare in response.

Soderbergh and Koepp, for their part, express their own fervent belief: in the seductive glamour of espionage and the magnetism of Blanchett’s and Fassbender’s interlocking gazes—which is to say, in the enveloping artifice and power of movies. Great is their faithfulness indeed.

It is taut, absorbing, and, at ninety-nine minutes, ruthlessly concise. But what it bears witness to, over several days and nights of funeral rites, is a staggering endurance test, in which Shula is tasked with honoring the dishonorable.

Even if DNA and memories could be duplicated at will, Bong suggests, individual morality would remain a glorious uncertainty principle, too human and singular to be nailed down. There’s a strange comfort in that idea, and in the movie’s sweetly hopeful finale.

The simple spectacle of children at play, it seems, is all it takes to transform a patch of American suburbia into a gaping, microcosmic wound of racism, paranoia, aggression, mental illness, and gun violence. But The Perfect Neighbor is not—or not entirely—a despairing work.

The result invites obvious yet not inapt comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick, but Bentley’s film—for all its crystalline imagery, its vision of Grainier’s home as a fallen Eden, and its air of metaphysical wonderment—unfolds in a more dramatically direct, compacted register.

If Sorry, Baby has a thesis of its own, it’s a fluid, liberating, non-deterministic one: simply put, pain and healing assume a range of unique forms, and the tales we tell about them should follow suit.

[Rankin’s] film, at its best when it expresses a sincere belief in the possibilities of human connection, can feel trapped in the margins of its conceit, short-circuited by movie love.

Paddington in Peru belongs to Olivia Colman, who, as the Reverend Mother at Aunt Lucy’s retirement home, delivers a performance so rich in winking mischief, and so blissfully untethered to the mechanics of the plot, that she should be billed in the credits as Irreverent Mother.

It was shrewd of the screenwriters, Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, to stick so closely to Eunice’s perspective, trusting the audience to identify with her uncertainty, her vulnerability, and her instinctive urge to protect her children. But I’m Still Here has its own share of tactical evasions, and its dramatic caginess winds up blunting its own emotional force.

Let no one, in their understandable eagerness to praise Leigh as an anatomist of the human condition, downplay just how entertaining Hard Truths is. Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force.

The Brutalist is an American epic of rare authority, and what gives it its power, I think, is what lends some buildings their fascination: a quality of dramatic capaciousness and physical weight, a sense that what we’re seeing was formed and shaped by human hands.

Beneath Rasoulof’s blistering rage erupts a wellspring of empathy: for young women, like Rezvan and Sana, fighting to be heard, and for wives and mothers, like Najmeh, participating in their own oppression.

Near the end, though, “Wicked” does surge to a kind of life.

We are not not entertained.

One of the year’s great movies, in any form, style, or language.

This is McQueen’s method: a passage of lyrical beauty, a chaser of righteous struggle. You cannot survive a war, he suggests, without both.

By turns a teeming slice of life and a virtuoso farce, reveals itself in the final stretch as a cracked fairy tale.

Schimberg may have concocted a madly inventive thought experiment, but to say that A Different Man merely deconstructs itself would miss how completely and satisfyingly it comes together. It’s a thing of beauty.

Fargeat’s movie can be called many things: a body-horror buffet, a feminist cri de coeur, an evisceration of the sunny, surface-obsessed Los Angeles where it unfolds. It’s also a movie of process, deliberately paced, exactingly observed, and no less gripping for its sometimes gruelling repetitions.

Where its predecessor kept a foot planted in reality, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” barrels through the underworld with an ever-looser, crazier Looney Tunes energy.

I can imagine many a moviegoer entering the theatre knowing nothing of Erice and his work, and getting caught up in the gentle grip of his filmmaking. Miguel’s journey may sway to a leisurely, elegiac art-film beat, but that rhythm barely conceals the pulsing machinery of a detective story.

The film’s own style may feel more prosaic than the poetic, but it’s awfully irresistible prose; its most conventional element, a plaintively beautiful musical theme composed by Tommy Wai, is also its most emotionally effective. Yet Hui does infuse a wistful poetry into her filmmaking

The insistent feel-good trajectory comes at the expense of thornier truths. The movie, for all its understanding of hard time, can’t keep from going a little soft.

Like many art films of a certain aesthetically adventurous, formally rigorous, narratively oblique persuasion, Music will probably be ignored by most and dismissed by many as excessively challenging at best and woefully obtuse at worst. But that overlooks the piercing, entirely accessible emotion that Schanelec layers into her story, often in ways that would seem counterintuitive in less assured hands.

It’s telling that, in a picture that exudes more than a whiff of artistic fatigue, the newcomer to Lanthimos’s company supplies the freshest impact.

Scene by scene, Green Border is a work of devastating intelligence, striking visual clarity, and extraordinarily propulsive anger.

If there’s a reason Janet Planet never succumbs to the rosy, banalizing glow of nineties nostalgia, it’s Baker’s ability to juxtapose multiple perspectives in the same static frame—a gift that feels closely rooted in her theatre work.

Yes, we all contain multitudes. And, yes, we must learn to take the bad with the good—a lesson that Inside Out 2 bears out more dispiritingly, I think, than its makers intended.

“Furiosa,” in other words, is both an end-of-days thriller and an Edenic parable, Revelation and Genesis rolled into one.

What is inescapably moving about Megalopolis, and what throws even its strangest excesses into meaningful relief, is the degree to which it has evolved into an allegory of its own making. Coppola has made a defense of the beautiful and the impractical, not just as principles of urban design or meaningful living but as art-sustaining forces in the cinema itself.

The incisiveness of Hamaguchi’s ecological critique is matched by the vividness of his characters; you’ll remember the talking points, but also the faces of the people making them.

Challengers, in other words, comes at you like an amped-up, Adidas-sponsored “Jules and Jim”—a funny, tempestuous, and exuberantly lusty story about how three athletic demigods see their destinies upended. And Guadagnino tells it the way he knows best, with a sometimes exasperating but ultimately irresistible surfeit of style.

As a tribute to the work that journalists do, Civil War feels entirely sincere—but even here the fuzziness of Garland’s execution undermines his nobler intentions.

At the heart of La Chimera is the question of how we bear the weight of the past while living in the present, and the answer that Rohrwacher settles on strikes me as both sensible and hopeful: we must, to the best that we can, eradicate any meaningful difference between the two.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is often breathtakingly funny, but its absurdity arises from a powerful sense of outrage—a principled disgust with the stupidity, hypocrisy, venality, and cowardice of the modern world.

About Dry Grasses may be unhurried, with languid steppe-by-steppe pacing and long, luxuriant, exquisitely sculpted conversations, but it is also nimble, alert, and alive in ways that seem to have taken Ceylan himself by surprise.

Coming-of-age dramas may be a dime a dozen at Sundance, but one this tender and truthful can make an entire subgenre feel shimmeringly new.

The result is a tough, harrowing work of self-portraiture in which it’s Ito’s own journalistic tenacity, as much as her personal determination and outrage, that leads her to go public with her story, despite enormous pressure to do the opposite.

It takes a confident storyteller to avoid the trap of overexplanation, to give us only a partial glimpse of her characters’ lives, and these narrative elisions have the effect of deepening rather than undercutting the story’s realism.

[A] tender, harrowing and beautifully modulated coming-of-age drama.

There’s also a fascinating dive into the inequalities that bedevil Boys State and Girls State themselves, reminding us how organizations often embody, at a structural level, some of the very problems they’re ostensibly trying to rectify.

It diverts for a while, only to dissipate almost immediately upon conclusion.