Justin Chang

Harris Dickinson, the spellbinding British newcomer who plays Frankie, rewards the director’s scrutiny with piercing emotional depth and a startling lack of self-consciousness.

Anchored by a fine and flinty performance from Mia Wasikowska, director John Curran’s gorgeously rendered adventure saga succeeds not only in capturing the harshness and wild beauty of Davidson’s journey, but also in mapping a delicate interior pathway into the heart of this most atypical explorer.

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.

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.

Not every joke here lands, and not every experiment proves successful, but it scarcely matters. The genius of the picture is that even its wildest, most boundary-pushing formulations are tied to a thoughtful, rigorous thesis about how disparities of race, class and money conspire to keep ruthless systems of human oppression in place.

Frenetic actioner about refugees from a genetic cloning plant starts off intriguingly, burns up its ideas in the first hour and pads out the rest with joltingly repetitive action sequences.

There are times when the nonstop visual momentum lends 1917 the feel of a virtual-reality installation, and others when the simulation of raw immediacy slips to reveal the calculated construct underneath.

Suffused with the gentle, unforced humanity viewers have come to expect from Hong Kong helmer Ann Hui, A Simple Life is a tender ode to the elderly, their caregivers and the mutual generosity of spirit that makes their limited time together worthwhile.

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.

Denis’ coolly appalling vision gets an infusion of warmth from [Robert] Pattinson, an actor of brooding intelligence and remarkable physical grace.

The stately rhythms of the dialogue — drawn out by the particulars of Davies’ blocking, framing and editing — become a kind of music. The effect is bewildering at first, then absorbing, then transfixing. Its purpose, in line with the loftiest ideals of poetry itself, is to clear the mind and stir the soul.

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

Even in a film that makes no bones about presenting its subject in a flattering, softening light, this 89-year-old stage and screen legend has refreshingly few qualms about saying exactly what she thinks.

It’s a sterling piece of American realism, powered by the transfixing spectacle of a great actor at the peak of her powers.

The behind-the-camera talent Ben Affleck displayed so bracingly in "Gone Baby Gone" is confirmed, if not significantly advanced, in The Town. Again proving a fine director of actors (this time with himself in a starring role), Affleck delivers another potent, serious-minded slice of pulp set on Boston's meanest streets, where loyalty among thieves runs thicker than blood.

Till is more understatedly effective, and Deadwyler’s performance at its most powerful, when Chukwu resists and even undermines the template of the prestige biographical drama she only appears to be making.

Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time: The Imax Experience is a glorious cosmic reverie, a feast for the eyes and a balm for the soul in these angry, contentious times.

Liu gives you plenty to listen to, but don't forget to look: Beyond the formulaic thriller plotting and the showy verbiage, it's the movie's richly textured vision of urban decay that stays with you.

Gibney’s film cuts across subjects and genres with its own fluid, quicksilver intelligence.

If the story is a welter of subplots, tangents and ideas — to the point of being overly taken at times with its own conceptual daring — Peele’s visual craft shows an admirable finesse and discretion.

As he did in his Three Gorges Dam documentary "Up the Yangtze," Chang examines how a particular strain of Western culture promises opportunity and prosperity for Chinese youth, even as it remains a continual source of intergenerational tension.

Piling on the misery-laden subplots in scene after angry, overamped scene, Before I Disappear is the sort of movie that can’t stop reminding you how cruel the world is and how messed up its people are, to the point where its bludgeoning cynicism feels no more authentic or lived-in than the glimmer of hope that suddenly breaks on the horizon.

What Polley achieves here is an artful, incisive distillation of Toews’ arguments, effectively if somewhat visibly engineered for clarity and brevity.

For all the impressive authenticity of the various settings, it’s Gerry and Curtis’ continually evolving push-pull dynamic that deservedly takes centerstage here, in a picture driven far less by narrative incident than by its gently pulsing comic undercurrents and vivid contemplation of character.

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.

Grass, true to its title, is small, sharp and bladelike. It may strike you as more of the same until you see it and its implications and possibilities begin to grow and multiply.

Personal Shopper is a gripping portrait of solitude, which is to say it’s a hell of a one-woman show for Stewart, the rare actress who can blur into the background and magnetize the camera in the same scene.

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.