Justin Chang

Both actors know how to hit Macqueen’s more emphatic dialogue with a soft, glancing touch; they also know how to settle into the script’s familiar narrative grooves, its intimations of mortality and grief, in ways that will yield fresh, distinctive notes of humor, emotion and even surprise.

The Mauritanian is a moral muddle as well as a narrative one, and it leaves you wondering why our empathy for Slahi has to be so mediated, negotiated and rationalized in the first place.

Konchalovsky has said that he meant to recapture the look of films from the ’60s, but these crisp, high-contrast images speak to another impulse as well: to look into a past shrouded in the fog of delusion and doublespeak, and to see through it with a clarity that burns and even heals

Land is a movie of hard truths that go down a little too easily, a story as terse but never as elemental as its title.

As reinforced by every capacious widescreen frame of Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography, the movie is both a portrait and a panorama, a story about Black self-determination as an individual and collective enterprise.

There is cruelty here but also tenderness, and hellish images that are followed by glimpses of a terrestrial paradise.

The Little Things has a couple of hair-raising scenes and a few nifty, low-key twists in store, though little about the overall experience of watching it can really be called surprising. I don’t mean that as a knock. The pleasures and comforts of crime fiction, even with the built-in expectations of suspense and revelation, are not always dependent on novelty.

The movie naturally pulses with life and energy, invigorated by its narrative sweep, its nimble camerawork and propulsive musical score composed by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. But Bahrani scrupulously resists the temptation to turn India into a flashy, exoticizing spectacle, as more than a few critics accused “Slumdog Millionaire” of doing.

Zendaya . . . has a way of rendering dialogue irrelevant. She holds a closeup here more skillfully and naturally than her co-star does, and her silence proves far more eloquent than his words. And those words turn out to be the undoing of Malcolm & Marie, not just because there are so many of them, but because they feel like the building blocks of a meta-movie parlor trick, an intellectual exercise that exists for no purpose other than its own justification.

As its delightfully loquacious title suggests, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is both methodical and enigmatic. It’s a movie that sees no real contradiction between the rational and irrational, only degrees of difference. The instinctive intelligence and curiosity that Márta brings to her emotional investigation, tempered by the kind of humility that only comes with great knowledge, is what makes her such an involving protagonist — someone you naturally want to follow down any rabbit hole that may present itself.

The brilliance of MLK/FBI lies in how effortlessly conversant it manages to be with the injustices of the present, without ever deviating from the injustices of the past.

I’m wary in general of making any definitive pronouncements about Locked Down, whose charms and irritations (and it has its share of both) are largely a matter of timing and perspective.

The suspension of disbelief that any celebrity impersonation requires may be multiplied fourfold here, but One Night in Miami ... turns that excess into a kind of economy. It moves, with light-fingered assurance, through sequences that transform from soulful arias into sustained duets, built around performances that are collaborative rather than imitative in nature.

In the bruising melodrama Pieces of a Woman, Vanessa Kirby does something remarkable and rare — or at least, she makes it seem rare. She brings sharp emotional definition to a character who, in the throes of a devastating loss, refuses to make her feelings easily readable, or consolable, for those around her.

The grimly multitasking finale of Promising Young Woman feels both audacious and uncertain of itself, as Fennell tries to meld a cackle of delight and a blast of fury, with a lingering residue of anguish. It doesn’t all come together, though there’s an undeniable thrill in seeing it come apart.

The lingering lesson of Soul, a lovely, imperfect movie about life’s lovely imperfections, is that every moment is worth living to the fullest, this one very much included.

Despite or perhaps because of its lightly sketched premise, To the Ends of the Earth emerges as the director’s most gracefully assured work in a while, though his natural gift for building tension is still made subtly manifest.

Gadot and Pine give great pillow talk, and their easy screwball rhythms provide not just levity but ballast: They ground a movie in which time, for all its malleability, always feels like it’s slipping away.

Greengrass can be as shrewd and skillful a storyteller as his hero, even if News of the World finally inspires something less than total belief.

[A] beautiful, engrossing and potently subversive new crime thriller.

Another Round itself often moves and swings like a piece of music: Staccato in its rhythms and symphonic in structure, it’s awash in Scarlatti and Schubert, bar tunes and patriotic songs, and climaxes with a jubilant blast of Danish pop/R&B. It sings, and it sparkles.

An unremarkable if far from unpleasant sequel.

The conventionality of Happiest Season might be the most radical thing about it. The movie boasts the usual surface delights and yuletide setpieces: It has competitive ice skating and a white-elephant-gift party, shticky running gags and acres of throw-pillow-heavy production design. It also has two lead performances of remarkable grown-up complexity and moment-to-moment coherence.

The horrors of Collective are sickeningly specific; the implications, as suggested by its comprehensive indictment of a title, are universal.

Boseman, evincing the same integrity he clung to his entire career, refuses to soft-pedal the destination. He imparts to this seething, shattered man the gift of a broken soul, riven by anger and trauma, and makes him all the more human for it. His final moments of screen time are among his darkest, and also his finest.

By zooming in and out of his protagonist’s consciousness, Marder casts aside any pretense of omniscience; he empathizes, but he also knows when to detach. Ruben’s journey is a privilege to witness, but it’s one he’ll ultimately have to walk alone.

Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, Hillbilly Elegy is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics.

Mank demands your surrender, but also your heightened attention. It’s a pleasurably discombobulating experience, sometimes playing like mordant drawing-room comedy and sometimes flirting with expressionist nightmare, as when Welles’ dark silhouette looms over a bedridden Mank and his mummified leg.

Winocour shows us smart, sometimes insensitive and fundamentally decent people navigating an extraordinary situation and the sacrifices that are made in service of a grand collective undertaking.

A crafty feature debut for the English writer-director Remi Weekes, His House is one of those return-of-the-repressed freakouts in which suspense and social conscience effectively breathe as one. That’s the idea, anyway.

With City Hall, his 45th feature, he [Wiseman] has composed another epic from a series of intricate, carefully arranged miniatures, a four-and-a-half-hour sprawl of a movie that will leave you admiring its agility and concision.

With a few exceptions . . . Borat’s satirical jabs don’t land with quite the same cringe-making force this time; the setups are too convoluted, the anonymous targets too genial, the payoffs too meager.

For much of this movie you may find yourself hoping that Zemeckis might somehow recapture the entrancingly macabre spirit of “Death Becomes Her,” still one of his greatest pictures and one of the few in which his flair for ever more outlandish visual effects feels perfectly in sync with the story he’s telling. But despite a few flashes of novelty . . . The Witches is pretty thin brew by comparison, concocted from mostly secondhand ingredients.

Hopefulness and rawness, much like society and the self, are ultimately inextricable in “Martin Eden,” a work of art that abounds in its own beautiful contradictions. It might reject individualism, but it’s also a glorious singularity.

The filmmakers seem curiously at sea over the purpose of their assignment, possessing neither the patience to plunge headlong into the story’s familiar depths nor the radicalism to reinvent it entirely.

Even its most surreal flights of fancy are tethered to a ploddingly diagrammed story whose indisputable lessons — cherish the ones you love, and also make room for more of them — are driven home with dispiriting obviousness.

Time can make you weep for a hundred reasons, from joy, pain or recognition, but its wounds and its glories are finally inextricable from one of the paradoxes of moviemaking itself. Cinema can magically compress decades into hours and transform lives into narratives, but what it erects here is ultimately a monument to something irretrievable. Cherish every moment of this movie, because each one stands in for all the others that have been lost.

Charm City Kings clearly knows what it’s doing; unfortunately, what it’s doing is often just as obvious to us.

It is hardly the fault of this breathless, incisive and thoroughly infuriating movie that it already feels a touch out of date. How could it not?

This is a funny film about death, which is to say it’s a wrenching film about life.

The sly achievement of The Forty-Year-Old Version is to turn a critical eye on the very idea of success (by whose standards?), and to ponder exactly what level of compromise is acceptable to secure it.

The Trial of the Chicago 7, smoothly entertaining as it is, may also elude clear consensus. Democracy is a messy business, but an element of real, lived-in messiness seems beyond this movie’s purview.

Bit by bit, line by line, she [July] nudges you onto her characters’ wavelength, navigating their world with matter-of-fact drollery and tethering even her weirdest flights of fancy to clear, accessible emotions.

You see in Felix the deadpan anarchic streak that has made Murray a force in American comedy for decades. At the same time, the actor seems to be winking at his own reputation for off-screen mischief — the tricks, stunts and pop-up bartending gigs that have made him a kind of one-man flash mob.

What makes Durkin’s vision so powerfully unsettling is its ease with ambiguity, its ability to make cruelty and tenderness seem like flip sides of the same human coin.

It’s a delight to see the director cut loose, along with his gifted behind-the-scenes collaborators (including production designer Helen Scott and costume designer Jacqueline Durran) and his captivating stars.

You can reject the conclusions of Campos’ movie, particularly its unrelenting pileup of dead bodies, and still take pleasure in its atmospheric surface — in the persuasiveness of its small-town environs (shot on 35-millimeter film by the gifted cinematographer Lol Crawley) and the vigor of its performances. He may not persuade you all the time, but the devil is very much in those details.

There is no transcendence at the end of her long, harrowing journey, but there are unexpected gifts, guardian angels and places of refuge. It would be hard to overlook the spiritual presence — a good word for it would be “grace” — that hovers over every frame of this movie and the spare, wrenching story it has to tell.

Ammonite, a work of art rather than science or history, has no qualms about departing from the known record — and does so with wit, beauty and a modernism that feels all the more bracing in this Victorian context.

A smart and absorbing new French comedy that initially unfolds like a series of psychotherapy sessions and eventually brings its story to a suitably mythic climax not far from a sputtering volcano.

Society’s rampant sexualization of preadolescent girls is one topic that Doucouré subjects to tough critical scrutiny; she’s made an empathetic and analytical movie, not an exploitative one.

You are advised to pay close visual attention, especially to Robert Frazen’s pinpoint editing and Melissa Toth’s subtly shifting costumes, even as you lean in to catch every word of Kaufman’s torrential dialogue and each detail of the mercurial, tinnitus-evoking sound design.

One of the movie’s persistent problems is that it often seems to be nothing but lessons — most of them bluntly spelled out, swiftly absorbed and almost automatically rewarded, in ways that short-circuit tension and emotion.

It’s both an overstuffed box of postmodern delights and a classically Dickensian repository of whimsy and charm.

What comes through most in Hawke’s brilliantly internalized performance is Tesla’s intense commitment to his work, as well as his weariness about having to continually explain and defend it to men of deeper pockets and lesser minds. The progress of human civilization can be infuriatingly banal, which doesn’t mean our biopics have to be.

Despite its bullet-point nods to toxic masculinity and some glib armchair sociology about the rage-fueled society we have become, “Unhinged” doesn’t have much on its mind. Its sharpest subtext derives from the casting of Crowe himself, whose malevolent glare and low, insinuating growl are scarily believable here, even as they suggest a self-conscious dig at his own past persona.

Its most memorable effects, though, are not technological in nature. They are the wary side-eye glances and unexpected smiles that cross Fishback’s face as she banters with Foxx and Gordon-Levitt and also the streams of hip-hop poetry — carefully scripted but thrillingly delivered — that come pouring out during a few welcome stretches of down time.

It’s a comedy, a heartbreaker and, above all, a twisty and suspenseful piece of political theater. Its rough-and-tumble snapshot of American youth in action is somehow both troubling and exhilarating.

This is proficient, measured filmmaking from a director who has already peered more deeply, and persuasively, into colonialism’s heart of darkness.

The concision of its story and the elasticity of its themes are crucial to its peculiar potency: Operating within tight narrative and budgetary confines, Seimetz seeks to reshuffle our perceptions, to alter our sense of how movies can represent the unrepresentable.

While the filmmaker keeps his eyes peeled for every possible shred of good news in the wake of disaster, he has little interest in peddling easy inspiration; the stakes are too colossal, the devastation too raw.

It starts throwing details at you almost immediately, each one building on yet also undermining the last, as if it were deliberately trying to confound your sense of what kind of movie you’re watching.

The pummeling, totalizing horror of The Painted Bird ultimately proves its undoing.

For a movie this fleet and funny (it’s a snap at 90 minutes), Palm Springs is surprisingly ripe for metaphorical plucking.

It’s the rare superhero movie in 2020 that can leave you wanting to see more, closing-credits kicker and all.

One of the show’s more obvious lessons is that history is a living, breathing entity, and that the cyclical rise-and-fall narratives of leaders and empires can be studied and recounted in ways that uncover bold new patterns of meaning. This film, a straightforward capture of a momentous work of art, illuminates those patterns in ways both sobering and thrilling.

There’s a special thrill in seeing an actor known for her own eerie perfectionism playing a woman who can’t abide imperfection in herself or others.

If this misleadingly titled movie is meant to be a whimsical Capra-esque fantasy, as the production notes suggest, then why does it make such a show of its topical relevance? If it’s meant to lay bare the realities of the system, as the production notes also suggest, then why does it feel so toothless and inconsequential?

Mendelsohn and Davis, among the finest Australian actors working today, are both awfully good at villainy, which is why their characters’ emotional restraint and fundamental decency here feels refreshing as well as true.

The writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples, making her feature debut, has a deft way with understatement, and here she casts an affectionate, gently ambivalent eye on the traditions and rituals that have long held sway in a small Fort Worth community.

The tonal shifts can be so abrupt as to induce whiplash, not to mention a kind of moral and narrative chaos, which seems to be very much to the movie’s point. The rich, tumultuous history of Black life over the past century could certainly find a worse cinematic analogue than this heady swirl of wry comedy, seductive music, ferocious argument and devastating carnage.

The King of Staten Island works hard to strike its own artful balance of humor and heartache, qualities that both seem permanently etched in Davidson’s face. Part of the movie’s inevitable fascination is the question of how much is made up and how much might be rooted in lived experience.

To some extent, Shirley delights in its own dissembling, but it also uses these complications to arrive at a place of startling truth. The sorcery in which Jackson claimed to dabble in real life finds a cinematic corollary in the movie’s bewitching late passages, which are by turns disorienting and illuminating.

The High Note, written by Flora Greeson, sits less comfortably on the fence between insiderish melodrama and broadly accessible crowd-pleaser.

Its achievement is predicated not on novelty, but on modesty — the way it manages, using little more than a terrific cast and a few shadowy, sparsely furnished rooms, to populate your mind’s eye with ominous visions.

The result is a movie that feels both truthful and evasive, deeply moving and a little perplexing.

Scoob! was never going to be a great musical, but did it have to turn out to be just another superhero movie?

One way to approach Spaceship Earth, Matt Wolf’s layered, absorbing and sympathetic new documentary, is as a madly inventive primer on responsible dystopian-hermetic living. But the film — which is being shown at drive-in theaters, in pop-up cityscape projections and on multiple streaming platforms — would make for fascinating viewing under any circumstances.

Driveways, a movie that’s poignant now for reasons we doubtless wish it weren’t, shows us how unlikely people can come together under imperfect circumstances and fit together perfectly. It also shows us how fleeting that perfection can be.

The beats of this story are easy enough to recognize, which is not to say that they’re formulaic. Sanders’ quietly mesmerizing performance refuses to let anyone cast Jahkor as either victim or villain, instead locating a tricky middle ground.

True History of the Kelly Gang, for its part, strikes just the right balance of scary and crazy, and it subjects both to an impressive measure of discipline.

Bad Education reminds us how synonymous great acting and great lying can be. Jackman and Janney, both giving their richest performances in some time, manage to pull the wool over your eyes with one hand even as they teasingly pull back the curtain with the other.

To ascribe easy labels to A White, White Day — to call it a study of masculine rage or a portrait of a community perched at the edge of the world — is to risk bleeding it of its elemental poetry.

Some might describe Butt Boy’s plodding, procedural-style storytelling as (ahem) assiduous, though I’d say constipation is the more appropriate metaphor: The story strains and clenches for more than an hour before finally reaching its bloody, long-overdue and admittedly eye-popping release.

Despite the range of musical genres represented and the obsessive attention to visual detail, there is a bland, wearying homogeneity to the way Trolls World Tour looks and sounds.

As a study in atmospheric seclusion, The Other Lamb is beautifully crafted enough to hold your attention, but you can’t shake the feeling that Selah’s next chapter — and Cassidy’s — might well be the more interesting movie.

The movie, which begins streaming Friday on Disney+, emerges a generally charming, sometimes cloying exercise in wildlife anthropomorphism.

This is cinema that pushes beyond the medium’s usual representational modes, beyond the observational qualities of neorealism or the interior states of psychological drama. Complex histories and unspoken emotions are distilled into a series of carefully composed tableaus, each one proceeding with slow, ceremonial deliberation.

More than most real-life stories about marginalized individuals overcoming daunting odds and deep-seated prejudices, “Crip Camp” manages to be at once sweetly affirming and breezily irreverent.

Suffice to say the plot’s every unfolding development is a deft and delightful surprise, and it may be the most suspenseful and entertaining demonstration yet of Reichardt’s rigorous attention to detail — her patient, genuine and remarkably cinematic fascination with the workings of process and minutiae.

This isn’t an easy movie, which is to say its meanings and motives have no interest in announcing themselves. But neither is it especially difficult, and if you let it, Schanelec’s gentle, supple stream of images and their attendant associations will bear you dreamily aloft. The meanings, if not necessarily the motives, will follow.

Your wandering attention may begin to fixate on other deficiencies: the flimsiness of the narrative scaffolding, the thinness of the characterizations and the filmmakers’ tendency to mistake platitudes for poetry.

It’s elegant and diabolically poised, a familiar story expertly retooled for an era of tech-bro sociopathy and #MeToo outrage, but also graced with an insistently human pulse. Studio brand extensions rarely feel this intimate, this personally unnerving.

Onward is a touching, lovingly crafted oddity — a movie that acknowledges its borrowed elements at the outset and then proceeds to reinvigorate them with tried-and-true Pixar virtues: sly wit, dazzling invention and a delicacy of feeling that approaches the sublime.

Directed with bristling immediacy by Rashaad Ernesto Green (“Gun Hill Road”), Premature could be classified as a love story, a coming-of-age drama, a cautionary tale (the title offers a clue) and a portrait of young black women and men finding their way in contemporary New York. But it also strikes me as a movie about the uses and occasional uselessness of language, with stop-and-go verbal cadences that seem particularly attentive to what its characters say and don’t say.

Contemplative, analytical and troubling, this is a nature film refracted through a historical trauma, a compilation of visual wonders that doubles as an act of remembrance.

Even when the picture eludes your narrative grasp, its estimable craft — evident in the shadows of Yves Cape’s photography and the moody ambience of the score, which Bonello composed himself — exerts its own hypnotic pull. The director’s talent, as ever, is predicated on an avoidance of the obvious.