Justin Chang

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell reminds us that confusion is often a necessary first step toward enlightenment, and that bafflement and beauty often go hand in hand. This is a lesson that Thiên must learn as well. The gift of this movie is that it invites us to learn it alongside him.

So why does it all feel so laborious and overworked, so frantically self-regarding? It has something to do with the insipid quality of the songs, none of which threaten to lodge themselves in your brain the way the first movie’s lines so effortlessly do.

Amid the roaring motors and screeching tires of “Ferrari,” Michael Mann’s operatic saga of fast cars, furious women and the powerful human citadel who toyed with them all, a moment occasionally rises from the smoke with the grace and clarity of an aria.

Despite its generally frictionless flow from meal to meal, its showstopping delicacies and subtly comical asides, The Taste of Things is haunted, from the start, by an awareness of the passage of time.

Minute by minute, it’s a roving, inquisitive, elegantly expansive portrait of an establishment whose many constituent and tangential elements — farms and markets, kitchens and dining rooms, chefs and sous-chefs, servers and customers — function together in a kind of whirring, bustling day-to-day harmony.

Oldroyd and McKenzie keep us adroitly off-balance.

As you leave The Boy and the Heron, you may feel strangely bereft, emptied out in a way that I suspect Miyazaki both intends and hopes to console us against.

Its glimmers of comic rage and generous helpings of battlefield carnage, though patchily entertaining on their own, never coalesce into a coherent reason for being.

Maestro holds its contradictions in balance; it sees the complexity and the tragedy of Lenny and Felicia’s romance, and also its undeniable tenderness and passion.

Less a movie about a scandal than a movie about a movie about a scandal, it seeks to interrogate and even subvert its own promise of ripped-from-the-tabloids titillation, even as it challenges the predilections of an audience that might seek out such a movie.

It’s amusing, up to a point.

This is a heartbreaker about mothers and daughters, the cruelty of repression and the slippery but revealing nature of performance. And to the end, it remains steadfast in its conviction that a woman’s truth and her beauty are never at odds.

This is a movie that teaches you how to watch it.

From unsettled beginning to wondrously open-hearted finale, The Delinquents is wise enough not to offer clear or easy answers, beyond its certainty that getting lost is the only way to be found.

With piercing matter-of-factness, Coppola ends this movie, her strongest in more than a decade, at just the right moment.

The Holdovers is a flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic movie masquerading as a compassionate, humane one.

Triet’s movie is a monument to the ambiguous and unknown, a labyrinth of half-glimpsed causes and vague, sinister effects.

One of the pleasures of “The Eras Tour” is the way it destroys the facile notion of a pure individual self. With its labyrinthine arc, jumbled chronology and dazzling changes of tone, milieu and costume, it’s Swift’s ode to invention and self-reinvention, the many different lives she’s lived and faces she’s presented over the course of her career.

Betts, whose first feature was the absorbing monastic drama “Novitiate,” has a gift for subverting and fulfilling expectations at once, and also for turning the strictures of traditional establishments inside out.

In The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Friedkin holds you rapt with the nimbleness of his camera placement (the sharp cinematography is by Michael Grady), the crispness of Darrin Navarro’s editing and, above all, the initially stiff but ultimately spellbinding rhetorical force of the actors.

[Anderson’s] movies have always proposed — sometimes ingeniously, sometimes exhaustingly, always sincerely — that we might benefit from looking at the world from a fresh vantage. And so it is with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, in which a revolutionary new way of seeing holds the key to an altogether deeper transformation.

Gorgeously shot on location by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, “A Haunting in Venice” is easily the best of Branagh’s three big-screen Christie adaptations, largely because it is also the most flagrantly unfaithful.

The movie, to its credit, harbors few illusions about Diana’s people skills. And it has, in Bening, an actor with a natural affinity for rough edges and sharp retorts, plus an ability to make emotional sense of a character’s fury.

As ever, Silva’s filmmaking — formally rough on the surface, carefully worked out underneath — depends on the steady upending of expectations. Social media is phony but potentially revealing. Bodies are hot and sexy until they’re gross and inconvenient. Jordan is insufferable, the worst kind of self-entitled Ugly American, but also endearing, perceptive and admirable in his tenacity.

The movie’s achievement is to remind us that milestones are invariably the result of hard, often thankless work, preceded by conflict and marked by compromise.

Saltburn is shocking only in its puerility. No sophomore effort should feel this sophomoric.

As a gorgeously conceptual art-horror object, El Conde frequently mesmerizes; as a proper evisceration of its subject, it can’t help but feel curiously defanged.

Lanthimos may have cobbled together a rambunctious psychosexual odyssey from many Frankensteinian parts — a little “Alice in Wonderland,” a dash of “Metropolis,” a soupçon of Voltaire by way of the Marquis de Sade — but he and his skilled collaborators have marshaled them into a remarkably coherent and purposeful vision.

More than any great movie I can remember, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers captures the eerie, disorienting and utterly sacred experience of encountering a lost loved one in your dreams.

“Golda” feeds that time-honored tradition of watching a virtuoso screen performer vanish behind a famous name and a wall of cinematic artifice.

It seeks to demystify the bodies we see, normalize the act of seeking medical intervention and remind us of the great swath of humanity — of different ages, colors, genders, shapes and sizes — passing every day through this ward and others like it.

As a director, Park stages his scenes with an unadorned flatness that strives to approximate the humdrum workaday poetry of Tomine’s comic-book frames but sometimes allows too much dead air to coalesce around the jokes and arguments.

Nimbly directed by Jeff Rowe (“The Mitchells vs. the Machines”) from a funny, perceptive script he wrote with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, this rambunctious action-comedy gives nostalgia-stoking, action-figure-selling, comic-book-derived franchise relaunches a good name.

Tomas is an inimitably singular creature. Loathsome and magnetic, infuriating and unforgettable, he is, by several bed lengths, the most dynamic protagonist Sachs has given us, a vessel of pure, untrammeled id.

Even when Talk to Me flirts with incoherence, Wilde pulls it back from the brink. More than just a great scream queen, she makes vivid sense of Mia’s ravaged emotions, revealing her to be a captive less to the spirit realm than to her own inconsolable grief. She’s the movie’s revelation, hands down.

While there are a few chuckles to be had here, mostly courtesy of Wilson’s gee-willikers delivery, the rest of the cast fares worse, including Haddish, whose bumbling clairvoyant is stuck cracking moldy jokes about PayPal and CVS.

With remarkable stealth and concentration, Diop rewires the generic circuitry of the courtroom drama, avoiding its natural inclination toward sensationalism and grandstanding. She also preserves, through a seamless meld of fiction and nonfiction, the contours and complexities of a terrible true story.

The realities of the situation are grim enough that a lesser work might have paled into insignificance, but No Bears — the best and bravest new feature I saw last year, a work of extraordinary emotional power, conceptual ingenuity and critical force — somehow manages the opposite.

Not for the first time, the demonstrative cleverness of [Nolan's] storytelling can seem too precise, too hermetically sealed and engineered, for a sense of raw collective devastation to fully take hold. That might be a rare failing of this extraordinarily gripping and resonant movie, or it could be a minor mercy.

Whatever you think of “Barbie,” the mere existence of this smart, funny, conceptually playful, sartorially dazzling comic fantasy speaks to the irreverent wit and meta-critical sensibility of its director.

If the filmmaking feels poetic and subdued, it’s the opposite of coy. Leaf is confident enough to let her images, as much as her written dialogue, do much of the narrative lifting.

Throughout this movie, an absorbing, barbed and frequently funny evisceration of artistic ego, Petzold practices a deft and disarming sleight of hand, using key details to keep the viewer off balance and deliver a stinging rebuke to Leon’s myopia.

Joy Ride, an amusingly rude and high-spirited romp from the debuting director Adele Lim (a co-writer on “Crazy Rich Asians”), has a way of turning predictable story beats into spiky, revealing cultural distinctions

Like so many globe-trotting thrillers and big-screen tourist brochures, it’s also a gleaming advertisement for Hollywood itself, a celebration and a reminder of how profoundly the movies have shaped our views of the world.

In a way, Indy has been swallowed up by not only the very action-comedy movie formula he helped normalize but also by the dispiriting, depersonalizing trends in 21st-century studio filmmaking.

The conceit itself is by turns intriguing and laborious, and depending on your willingness to unpack it, it will be either the revelation that sends this movie soaring into the stratosphere or the heavy stone that drags its featherweight pleasures down to earth.

Keaton’s performance — sly, affectionately cranky, subtly reverberant — is certainly one of The Flash’s highlights. But it also reveals, with depressing clarity, the imaginative poverty of the movie’s design.

The film’s refusal to tie up loose ends has already inspired comparisons to Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” two of modern cinema’s great cold-case classics. Moll’s movie doesn’t leave behind the same deep, implacable chill of those earlier works, but its lingering rage and sorrow are no less easy to wave aside.

This is at once the loftiest and the most grounded love story I’ve seen in some time, a movie that feels lingering and contemplative in the moment but is over as quickly (too quickly) as a drink with a long-absent friend.

The conclusion that Glazer arrives at, with a sudden formal rupture, is shattering in ways that defy easy description. More than any movie I’ve seen this year, or perhaps any year, The Zone of Interest leaves you pondering the magnitude of what the banality of evil has wrought — and the terrible, inconsolable void that it leaves behind.

Corsini leans a little too hard on narrative convenience, but she also has a gift for illuminating everyday racism — the matter-of-fact microaggressions, the unspoken anxieties — in a story of youthful alienation and restlessness. Whenever believability falters, Corsini and her fine actors manage to pull you back in.

A taut and rigorous piece of storytelling in which seething tempers and unruly politics are forever on the verge of leaping out of the movie’s tightly framed, square-shaped images, the movie may concern itself with distant events, but its subjects — antisemitism, police corruption, political awakening — are very much of the present.

What’s on-screen too often feels like wan, second-rate imitation, and the few differences seem motivated less by a spirit of imagination than one of joyless anxiety.

McQueen and Stigter haven’t just excavated some not-so-ancient history; they’ve also made a haunting, magisterial tribute to a city they clearly love.

If “Killers” miscalibrates its balance of perspectives, it also discovers, in the luminous recesses of Gladstone’s performance, a quality of contemplation that beautifully suffuses and modulates Scorsese’s faster, more frenetic rhythms.

This absorbing, ambiguously titled movie builds to a moving finish, one that reaffirms Kore-eda’s peerless skill at directing young actors in particular.

The possibility of redemption hangs over this movie, as it does in much of Schrader’s work. But for the first time in this trilogy, that possibility is resolved in a manner that feels neither fully examined nor earned.

The movie is a polished, well-made affair (Depp’s smallpox pustules look scarily state-of-the-art) but also a disappointingly juiceless one, with little of the messy go-for-broke filmmaking energy that Maïwenn has brought to better, rougher works like “Polisse.”

Hayakawa keeps her story at an intimate and, for the most part, effective human scale. Baisho’s beautifully calibrated performance holds us close, turning Michi’s every step — a brief stint as a traffic guard, a trip to a cafe she once frequented with her husband — into a quiet act of resistance against her perceived uselessness.

An enjoyably eccentric, insouciantly funny and often beautiful-looking jumble of an entertainment that plays — at least when it isn’t let down by a wobbly seriocomic tone and some excessive narrative multitasking — like a sincerely moving farewell to some of the more likable rogues and motley misfits in the Marvel cosmos.

Part Frederick Wiseman-esque medical study, part endoscopic-horror tour de force, it is a thing to be experienced, ideally in a theater — a movie theater, not an operating one, though the filmmakers have a particular genius for blurring the difference.

Mungiu is a master of the long, talky slow burn, and if R.M.N. often feels less focused and more sprawling than some of his earlier movies (“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Graduation”), that’s a testament to its expansiveness and ambition. The story becomes increasingly gripping as it meanders and lingers, broadens and deepens, putting peripheral characters into play and bringing latent hostilities to the surface.

A visually arresting, politically forceful melodrama from Pakistan.

Partly drawn from Zlotowski’s own personal experience, Other People’s Children sneaks up on you, with a depth and complexity of feeling that throws those glossy, idyllic opening moments into bittersweet relief.

Beau Is Afraid offers arresting confirmation of Aster’s talent and fresh evidence of his limitations. It’s a big, wildly ambitious swing of a movie, one that seems eager to liberate itself and its characters from the conventions of form and genre. But that more expansive energy is at odds with and ultimately constrained by the story’s mother/man-child dialectic.

This isn’t the first time Shinkai has raised the specter of environmental disaster within the context of a swooningly sentimental teenage fantasy, and if this one doesn’t achieve the dazzling intricacies or soaring emotional heights of “Your Name,” its easy blend of enchantment and feeling is nearly as hard to resist.

More than once in Showing Up, her wry and wonderful new movie, the director Kelly Reichardt gives us something that feels rarer than it should in American cinema: a lingering moment in the presence of an artist at work.

In some ways, the movie is also carrying on a subliminal, more subtly nostalgic conversation with the ’90s, the decade that transformed Affleck and Damon into household names and saw some of their key supporting players here first rise to prominence.

When the movie goes in for an infrequent closeup — a shot of ultrasound gel being smeared on Lynn’s belly or of Lynn’s face as she puts on a surgical mask in the immediate wake of the COVID-19 outbreak — the intimacy is startling, and instructive.

Walk Up flows as absorbingly as a dream and is no less pleasurable to puzzle over afterward.

It’s worth your time, your discomfort, your possible scorn and your weirdly grudging affection, maybe all at once.

The mix of busy comic exaggeration, affectionate ’80s nostalgia trip and gloomy mid-perestroika history lesson never comes together.

Even by series standards, it’s an astonishingly staged and sustained panorama of violence, much of it mediated (and attenuated) by the usual inventive weaponry and bulletproof menswear, and meted out by international action stars including Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada.

Zhang’s own authorial touch is unmistakable in the mazelike palace intrigues, the phalanxes of armed soldiers and the ferocious bursts of action, plus the climactic nationalist overtones of a story that pits the will of several individuals against the fate of an empire.

Chang Can Dunk gets that the pursuit of fun, seemingly frivolous goals can be meaningful in itself, especially when undertaken with the loving encouragement of friends and family.

The filmmaking maintains its discretion and unblinking restraint even in its most terrifying passage, shot with an implacable calm that renders it all the more unbearable.

In scene after scene, Serra holds beauty and menace in a kind of uneasy equilibrium. He’s made a trouble-in-paradise movie where the trouble doesn’t overwhelm the paradise so much as poison it, at an almost imperceptible slow drip, from the inside.

It’s hard to completely dismiss a mainstream horror-comedy that offers a nice supply of sharp and grisly, at least until it takes a disappointing turn for soft and cuddly.

Written and directed by the Australian actor Frances O’Connor, making a vibrant feature filmmaking debut, it will surely madden sticklers for accuracy, which is all to the good.

The moments of wit and feeling that occasionally steal into the frame. . .feel like emotional outliers in a flat, inexpressive void.

Admirably ambitious if conceptually muddled, it short-circuits a lot of those signature “Magic Mike” pleasures — including some of the lust, and a lot of the laughs — and signals its headier ambitions with a dramatic shift in scenery.

The movie is, like so many Nuremberg accounts, an alternately thrilling and chastening portrait of accountability in action. But it is also, as its title suggests, a thoughtful appraisal of the moral properties of the moving image.

The more you realize where Shyamalan is leading us — and by this point, it’s not exactly a surprise destination — the more difficult it becomes to locate a worthwhile point. Perhaps the point is in the impressive discipline of the filmmaking, though if anything, given its premise, the movie wants to be a grislier, more nastily unhinged piece of work than it manages.

As good as his actors are — especially the wonderful Dequenne, whose Sophie quietly seeks to repair the boys’ broken bond — they cannot conceal the calculation inherent in this story’s design. Nor can they quite overcome the disconnect between the glossy, self-admiring visual beauty of Close and the stormier, uglier emotional depths it purports to uncover.

If Fair Play spends the better part of two hours tracing this newly lopsided romance to its logical, unhappy conclusion, the blow-by-blow machinations are still a chilly wonder to behold. What gives the movie its driving tension isn’t just the glaring imbalance between Emily and Luke as employees, but a deeper incompatibility between the personal and professional imperatives they’ve chosen.

There is nothing better about this Cat Person, which coarsens, flattens and torturously over-elaborates a story whose elegant concision was precisely what made it such rich and elastic interpretive fodder.

A brutal study of physical extremity and psychological meltdown built around an entirely astonishing lead performance from Jonathan Majors.

When the camera looks at Brendan Fraser in “The Whale,” what does it see? I think it sees a good actor giving a well-meaning, unevenly directed and often touching performance in a movie that strives to wrest something raw and truthful from a story that’s all bald contrivances, technological as well as melodramatic.

For a movie that bristles with more revolutionary fervor than Dahl’s quieter, more inward-focused story, “Matilda the Musical” could use a little messier, more rambunctious energy.

Nighy lures you into the impression that he’s sharing a private joke with you, a glimmer of comic insight into an unbearably sad situation.

I’ll admit that I found much of Babylon mesmerizing, even when (maybe especially when) I also found it naive, bludgeoning and obtuse. Chazelle’s demolition of the Dream Factory may be rather too taken with its own naughtiness, but coming from a filmmaker who until now has been precociously well-behaved, it can be a welcome blast of impudence and sometimes just a blast.

In Avatar: The Way of Water, the director James Cameron pulls you down so deep, and sets you so gently adrift, that at times you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie so much as floating in one.

[A] beautifully bittersweet and generous movie — which, like life itself, draws no distinction between the significant and the insignificant.

In EO, the camera doesn’t just follow the story or record the action. Its restless, exploratory movements express a kind of shared consciousness, a spirit of communion among different members of the animal world, whether they’re running together in a field or sharing the same tight enclosure. It’s the grace of this movie to extend that communion to the human beings who pass in front of the camera, and whose fates are tightly bound up with EO’s, whether they realize it or not.

Excessive reverence has killed many a well-meaning adaptation, but this “White Noise,” at once wildly mercurial and fastidiously controlled, somehow winds up triumphing over its own death. It’s too full of life — and also too funny, unruly, mischievous and disarmingly sweet — to really do otherwise.

The Eternal Daughter is haunting, as all the best ghost stories are. The best love stories too.

The more the movie pulls away from Peter’s perspective, the more it undercuts its own tension. And even with a physically impressive production at his disposal, Fuqua’s filmmaking instincts are clumsy and prone to cliché.

The result is both a study in historical amnesia and a kind of epistemological detective story, in which the grim truth is as hard to refute as it is hard to prove.