Justin Chang

What begins as a realist snapshot of the global migrant crisis gradually expands into an aching story of love, loss and the return of the repressed.

Booksmart leaves you feeling unaccountably hopeful for the state of humanity — and the state of American screen comedy too.

It’s a lot of fun — and often quite funny — while it lasts, though I could have used less gunplay and more whistling, an element that, more than anything else here, speaks to Porumboiu’s gift for deadpan absurdity.

Like a more showily virtuosic version of his countryman Jia Zhangke (who worked with Liao in his own recent gangster thriller “Ash Is Purest White”), Diao uses the conventions of genre to illuminate a world where crime, corruption, rapid social flux and soul-crushing inequality are inextricably intertwined.

No one really needs this mostly middling, fitfully funny and never unpleasant movie. And the movie itself seems cheerfully aware of that fact as it deftly lifts lines, beats, characters and songs from its 1992 predecessor, every so often punching up the comedy, wrinkling the plot and injecting a dash of politically corrective subtext.

The final act of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is funny, scary, troubling and exhilarating by turns; the meandering structure clicks into place as it becomes clear where Tarantino has been taking this story and, given his track record, perhaps could only have taken this story.

Ly surveys all his characters without judgment, but a longer, richer version of this movie might have distributed its sympathies to even more powerful effect.

Malick, a Christian philosopher-poet whose meanings can often be vague and elusive, seems to have been stung into an uncharacteristically blunt response, a forceful denunciation of the complicity of church and state.

This is a quietly insinuating picture with, by my estimation, one good jump scare, a lot of queasy chuckles and an overall atmosphere of slow, creeping, heavily perfumed rot.

As a stripped-down, minutely detailed portrait of the daily grind as back-breaking Sisyphean ordeal, “Sorry We Missed You” is engrossing and bluntly persuasive. I was less convinced by the family dynamics.

But if the tone is more restrained, more elegiac, and lacking that signature Almodóvar outrageousness, the emotional force still knocks you sideways.

A brazen mix of head-through-the-glass violence and pie-in-the-face slapstick, with a dash of Capra-esque working-class comedy for good measure, Police Story is remarkably seamless in tone and execution.

The resulting genre stew is rich and flavorsome, if also somewhat chunky and uneven. The characters are thinly drawn by design, but Mendonça Filho and Dornelles know how to use the magnetism of their actors to maximum advantage.

As with its beloved subject and his enormous catalog of multiplatinum earworms, the movie’s familiarity turns out to be crucial to its charm.

Although ostensibly set in the present day, this odd, frightening and entrancing little movie seems stuck in a moment out of time.

You can share Jarmusch’s despair — I certainly do — and still find its expression here too tired, bloodless and self-satisfied by half.

The experience of watching Ask Dr. Ruth is a bit like that of meeting someone unaccountably delightful and almost being knocked backward by the gale-force strength of her personality, and then wanting to go out and buy one of her books so as to actually learn something about her ideas.

To merely describe what happens in Rafiki would be to overlook its transporting sense of place, its striking visual pleasures and its credible and moving performances.

It isn’t good, exactly — as boozy friend-reunion comedies go, it’s no “Girls Trip” or “The World’s End” — but it has its ticklish grace notes, plus some first-rate second and third bananas, despite a script that seems to be working both too hard and not hard enough.

What Tolkien offers instead is a picturesque, amber-soaked balm for armchair Anglophiles: the manners and mores, the crisp witticisms and stirring, stiff-upper-lip sentiments. These pleasures aren’t negligible. But neither are they a substitute for a genuinely cinematic window into a genius’ mind.

If the idea was to tell the story from Liz’s perspective, the movie botches that perspective badly: Abandoning any sense of narrative rigor, it can’t keep hunky, charming Ted from becoming the protagonist of his own hideous story.

At times it might remind you of a slightly edgier version of the genteel White House romances that flourished in the mid-’90s, like Dave and The American President. Long Shot may nod overtly to a world under threat by terrorism, corruption and climate change, but it also yearns for a gentler, less polarized moment in our political discourse.

Vidal-Naquet’s film knows that every wound and balm to the flesh is also one to the spirit.

The inside jokes and fan-service digressions are blatant and relentless, but also pretty effective. The conflicting narrative priorities that often bedevil an epic series finale — how to tell a story that builds with inexorable momentum while also staging the mother of all cast reunions? — are cleverly and resourcefully reconciled.

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.

With considerable grace and beguiling modesty, the movie frames its subject as one of Christ’s most discerning followers and a crucial witness to his ministry, death and resurrection.

This Hellboy can be something to see. It can also be a giant bore.

Shazam! commits none of the Seven Deadly Sins of franchise filmmaking, only the venial offenses of excessive multitasking and being a bit over-eager to please.

The actors are better and subtler than their earlier counterparts; the gore effects, too. Moviegoers looking for an excuse to grab their companions’ arms for two hours could certainly do worse.

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

The triumph of Diane is that the movie, no less than its heroine, refuses to be diminished. What looks at first like a solid, well-carpentered exercise in downbeat indie realism ends up, by dint of its unexpected tonal and temporal leaps and sudden formal ruptures, in less easily definable territory.

To describe 3 Faces as a multi-generational portrait would not be entirely inaccurate, though it would risk divesting the movie of its quotidian poetry, its deep reserves of mystery and its rich rewards for an open-hearted audience. Sometimes, as these characters understand by journey’s end, it’s important to go and discover the truth for yourself.

This is a comedy whose laughs seem to arise as much from the silly, sun-drenched atmosphere as from individual gags, and whose pleasures can feel as sweet and impermanent as marijuana smoke.

One of the reasons An Elephant Sitting Still is so absorbing is that it has the advantage of duration, a willingness to linger in moments of silence and stillness. Paradoxically, as a result, it moves far more swiftly than you might expect.

It’s a compelling thesis, though predicated less on supporting arguments than on dramatic feints and hallucinations, on scenes that either evaporate like smoke or strand the viewer in a thick cloud of metaphor. Sunset is maddening and mesmerizing.

Dragged Across Concrete has been made with enough skill and moody, meticulous craftsmanship — another Zahler signature — to earn its own measure of tolerance, or at least some closer scrutiny.

The Inventor becomes less an exposé of white-collar crime than a study in the power of self-delusion and corporate megalomania. Gibney’s methods are simple but often brutally effective.

Once again, the director draws upon the sketch-comedy gifts he honed on “Key & Peele” to achieve an artful, ruthless balance of horror and hilarity. Us is a tour de force of comic tension and visceral release, a movie that weaponizes our chuckles against us and reminds us that laughing, screaming and thinking are not mutually exclusive pleasures.

The movie welds subtly pointed social commentary onto a straightforward but satisfying narrative of self-discovery.

Transit touchingly illuminates the close bonds that can form within migrant communities, even as it refuses to harbor any illusions about how easily those bonds can be broken.

If the process of passing judgment at all fascinates you (and perhaps it goes without saying that it would fascinate a critic), it’s hard to resist The Competition’s extensive breakdown of how one weighs the merits of artistic goals and visions that tend to elude the usual scoring mechanisms.

What makes the extended trip-tastic finale ultimately disappointing is that it remains a resolutely exterior experience, a set of wild but recycled gestures that reminds you just how tedious watching someone else’s LSD high can be.

Directed by the gifted but erratic Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, the movie is thin, rote and silly but, Huppert being Huppert, it’s good for a diabolical chuckle or two.

Perhaps the highs feel so stirring, in part, because they are surrounded by so much conventional din and clatter.

Within the context of a sport that thrives on artifice, writer-director Stephen Merchant spins a story whose emotions feel entirely genuine.

The Image Book is an 85-minute cinematic brainstorm, a swirling, dazzling, maddening frenzy of disconnected sights and sounds that have been compiled and arranged according to a rhythmic and rhetorical logic that only its maker can fully divine.

The movie is undeniably long, talky and dense, but it is never uninteresting. You might call it slow too, though at the risk of mischaracterizing the speed of its verbiage and the dizzying complexity of its ideas.

The puns and one-liners are jauntily amusing, the gags clever and well-timed. The tone is a familiar, infectious blend of sincerity and snark — or, if you will, earnestness and cynicism, which might as well be Emmet’s and Wyldstyle’s respective nicknames.

If The Souvenir seems to move assuredly to its own unconventional rhythms, it’s because Hogg isn’t telling a straightforward story; she’s showing us, piecemeal, how an artist’s sensibility comes into being.

The Report parcels out its intel efficiently enough, though it creaks a bit more than it crackles.

A patchwork of impressions, ruminations and unsolved mysteries, The Last Black Man in San Francisco teems and even overflows with life and love, some might argue at the cost of narrative focus or momentum. That strikes me as precisely the point.

With exquisite poise, wry humor and delicate swells of feeling, The Farewell addresses and gently critiques the stoicism that Asians and Asian Americans are often taught to project as a matter of pride and dignity.

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

This is a profound and difficult film, an attempt to grapple with the existence and mindless perpetuation of evil, and to suggest both the fleeting satisfaction and the eternal futility of vengeance. Nothing about it is easy, and everything it shows us matters.

It’s understandable that Hardwicke didn’t want to mimic her predecessor’s moves. But in chop-chop-chopping the action into standard Hollywood fragments, she has drained the material of its tension, its meaning and its purpose, to say nothing of its beauty.

The occasional creakiness of the narrative machinery is largely dispelled by Cornish’s flair for brisk, energetic action and his ability to keep the journey flowing from one mini-adventure to the next.

It flirts with politics but is content to settle, in the end, for a parlor trick.

While Glass is an intermittent showcase for his undeniable filmmaking gifts — his meticulous attention to detail, his shivery command of technique — the movie winds up feeling less like a progression than a dead end.

The Upside was probably never going to be a good movie, but it needn’t have been such an unfortunate, spectacularly ill-timed one, the victim of circumstances it ultimately has neither the wit nor the imagination to transcend.

It would be silly to expect this movie to achieve the cinematic equivalent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliance, but you can’t help wishing it had more to offer than righteous speeches and stirring glances, that it put a few more ideas in your head to go with that lump in your throat.

It’s a muddled, tortured miasma of a movie and also, inevitably, a fascinating one.

Bier plunges herself into mainstream horror filmmaking with a gusto that doesn’t always offset her lack of precision. For visceral intensity, she never tops the early scenes of mayhem and mass panic; slow-building, artfully modulated tension in close quarters seems beyond the movie’s interest or purview.

As it is, so much obvious care has been taken to reproduce and update the charms of the Robert Stevenson-directed original — to deliver an old-fashioned yet newfangled burst of family-friendly uplift — that Mary Poppins Returns winds up feeling both hyperactive and paralyzed. It sits there flailing on the screen, bright, gaudy and mirthless, tossing off strained bits of comic business and all but strangling itself with its own good cheer.

The ending packs a lovely surprise, not because you don’t see it coming, but because for once you’re not simply grateful that it’s arrived.

By the end of this clumsy, audacious story — the title of which turns out to have a doozy of a double meaning — Ben will be stripped of every last secret and falsehood, left with no more room to run or hide. You believe him at long last, even if believing the movie is a trickier proposition.

The movie doesn’t just feel coldly analytical; it’s raw and enveloping, darkly funny and terribly alive.

Happy as Lazzaro is slow to reveal its full shape: It’s a realist snapshot of downtrodden lives that gradually takes on shadings of fable and myth, a deceptively plain story that, by the end, all but glows with wonderment and surprise.

For those with little prior knowledge of Farhadi’s earlier work, Everybody Knows will play like an intelligent, engrossing drama about a sudden family tragedy that reopens past wounds. The director’s admirers, myself included, might find it harder to get past a dramatic approach that, sturdy though it may be, is starting to harden into formula.

The lines between good and evil are clearly demarcated at the outset and remain more or less fixed as the story progresses, a strategy that in no way compromises the filmmaker’s ability to mine fresh complications and surprises from his story.

It’s terrific — a quick-witted entertainment, daring and familiar by turns, that also proves to be sweet, serious and irreverent in all the right doses.

Aretha Franklin didn’t transcend the gospel or gospel music; as first her album and now this marvelous documentary remind us, she did more than most to fulfill its potential for truth and beauty, devotion and art.

Most of all you remember Colman, in a performance that achieves its power, in no small part, by utterly destroying our understanding of what power looks like. She beams and scowls, brays and bleeds, shatters and disintegrates. She rules.

If it lacks its predecessor’s bracing sense of emotional discovery, it nonetheless understands and impressively re-creates the chief source of that movie’s delight: a group of characters who, for all their stresses and struggles, were a warm, easygoing pleasure to spend time with.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is a witty, fastidiously imagined adventure and a touching, sometimes troubling ode to the power of friendship. But it also demonstrates some of the problems that can befall a movie when its vast ambition and confidence outstrip its finesse.

The Crimes of Grindelwald is somehow both hectic and leaden, a thing of exhausting, pummeling mediocrity. It offers up dazzling feats of sorcery and realms of wonderment (early 20th-century London and Paris among them) and manages to conjure the very opposite of magic.

Boy Erased is a sobering, justly infuriating movie, but its own convenient elisions keep catharsis at bay.

Whatever else it may be — a wrecked, towering monument to its own incompletion, a howl of rage at the industry that Welles helped build and forever define — The Other Side of the Wind increasingly comes to resemble a shattered cinematic hall of mirrors.

More experimental in form and wobbly in execution than its predecessor, this searching adaptation of Leah Hager Cohen’s 2011 novel nonetheless evokes a family’s fragile inner life in ineffably moving fashion, capturing how distant and isolated parents and children can feel from one another even when living under the same roof

The irony is that Bohemian Rhapsody, a song that triumphantly bucked convention, should now serve as the title of a movie that embraces every cliché in the days-of-our-lives biopic handbook.

Wang, weaving deftly in and out of his ensemble and revealing the characters’ interconnected relationships in piecemeal fashion, shows how the bonds of community and activism intersect, not always conveniently, with those of love and family.

The pleasures of theatrical performance become more pronounced, playful and complex in Part Two: Walk With Me a While, which, as its title hints, takes a meandering but fascinatingly surreal turn.

A knotty detective yarn, a funny valentine to Singapore and one of the year’s most ardent expressions of movie love, it tells a story of cinematic theft, and in the process, becomes an entrancing feat of cinematic reclamation.

By the time the phantasmagorical finale arrives, you are flooded with blood and viscera, yes, but also something even more unsettling — a sudden onrush of feeling, a deep, overpowering melancholy.

Cummings’ achievement is too singular to be reduced to a simple political reading; and in much the same way, Jim’s hard-won final scene is too ambiguous to be read as either celebration or damnation. If, by that point, there’s even any meaningful difference.

Mid90s possesses just enough sensitivity and feeling to make you wish it had more. Hill’s script aims for, and often achieves, a fleeting, fragmentary portrait of group dynamics, but it’s stymied in its attempts to distinguish Stevie’s pals as individuals rather than types.

Mulligan's performance is too specific and too wrenching to be reduced to a mere generational statement. This is her most fully formed role since her performance in another early '60s piece, the British coming-of-age drama "An Education," and in some ways it feels like a rejoinder, perhaps even a corrective.

With a canny balance of empathy and exploitation, Halloween treats its heroine’s lingering trauma with surprising emotional realism and only a hint of comic exaggeration.

The Kindergarten Teacher may offer a less audacious, more stylistically muted version of its predecessor, but by the time its quietly perfect final shot arrives, the movie has reached the same provocative conclusion. It’s not poetry, exactly, but it’s pretty shattering prose.

Truth be told, I don’t much mind the version of Bad Times at the El Royale we have before us. Even if, with its multi-chapter narrative and time-skipping plotlines, its mix of verbal longwindedness and abrupt violence, the movie initially seems to warn of a terminal case of Tarantino-itis: an El Royale with cheese.

Jenkins constructs an entire narrative from little exchanges, reveries, complications and setbacks. With a mix of concentration and expansiveness that can take your breath away, she unpacks exactly what “they’ve tried everything” means.

Directed with flat, joyless competence by Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland,” “Gangster Squad”), “Venom” brings with it a laborious, decades-spanning development history. A movie this long in the works should arrive on-screen feeling like more than just an afterthought.

For all her improvisational skill and that of her top-billed costar, the much-vaunted Hart-and-Haddish pairing never pays dividends. It feels more like Half-and-Half.

The result, while fragmented by design, is a politically astute, emotionally layered examination of a violent death and its lingering psychic residue.

One of the pleasurable discoveries of this continually surprising movie is that artifice can be the most direct route to the truth.

In the end, Audiard plays to his past strengths as a poet of wounded masculinity; in its most touching moments, The Sisters Brothers is like a hangout movie on horseback.

Westmoreland means to celebrate Colette the literary titan and bisexual pioneer, and to dissolve your initial outrage at her mistreatment in a warm bath of feel-good satisfaction. But he also wants to paint a lively, credible portrait of a genuinely complicated marital arrangement and to show how one woman’s genius could flourish even amid so much oppression and compromise.

At his best, Roth plunders elements from countless other tales of supernatural spookery — ominous spell books, shuddering tombstones, grown men and little kids shooting lightning bolts from their fingertips — and nudges them eerily close to genuine enchantment.

Morley sustains a vibe of low-key Lynchian weirdness throughout, enough to keep your mind from wandering even as the investigation meanders this way and that.

[A] delightfully voluble new comedy.

In Fabric unfolds in a twilight zone where capitalism is a kind of dark magic, people become slaves to shopping, and the language of corporate-speak casts its own cultish spell.

The grim relentlessness with which Destroyer seesaws between time frames — as if to make sure that no state of abjection, past or present, goes unexplored — wore me out long before the endlessly protracted finish.

Gorgeously shot, lighted and scored, and acted by both leads with an incandescence that feels fully lived in, Cooper’s movie seduces you almost immediately. It doesn’t promise the shock of the new, but from the first frame it casts a spell, the kind that lets you know immediately that you’re in good hands.

Over the course of a generous 137-minute running time, Mackenzie evinces a patience in his own storytelling that only occasionally tests yours. There are excesses and longueurs, to be sure, but crucially, the tone of the piece never feels monotonous.

The detachment at work in Beautiful Boy suggests an attempt to speak clearly and truthfully, to resist the clichés of the addiction drama while acknowledging that those clichés can hardly be rewritten.

The Children Act evinces measured intelligence and polished craftsmanship without ever quite shaking off the feel of a work filtered through its non-native medium. Still, it’s always rewarding to watch Thompson bring her lucid wit and deep emotional reserves to bear on a meaty role.

From time to time its mix of foul-mouthed bro camaraderie and in-your-face violence nods in the direction of modest entertainment value, but the net effect is a whiplash-inducing muddle. The movie is full of noise and energy but devoid of real wit, coherence or impact.

In Widows, diversity isn’t an opportunity for showy tokenism or liberal pieties. It’s a matter-of-fact reflection of a city’s seething internal dynamics, an opportunity to probe inequities of race, class and gender that few American movies, let alone American genre movies, ever attempt to address.

Chazelle seems to be trying to both uphold and transcend the narrative template established by astronaut dramas like “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13,” with their scenes of hard-working men barking orders from ground control (Kyle Chandler does the honors nicely here), and of astronauts’ wives worrying that they may soon be widows. Even his missteps...underscore his desire to tell a story of collective accomplishment through one man’s extraordinary perspective.

In cutting against the aesthetic grain, Jenkins gently and wisely corrects our vision. The passionate glow of this filmmaker’s embrace belongs, quite rightly, to his characters. He is generous enough to also extend that embrace to us.

Despite its clammy atmosphere and two credible and appealing leads, the movie is mechanical in its rhythms and unimaginative in its terrors.

A slow-building shiver of a movie, The Little Stranger tells a familiar but pleasurably engrossing story.

Let the Corpses Tan — or, to use its even better French title, “Laissez Bronzer Les Cadavres” — is a feverish, obsessive act of cinematic rehabilitation, a shoot-’em-up conceived in tribute to a peculiar strain of blood-spattered B-movies from the 1960s and ’70s.

At a little over 90 minutes, Support the Girls has the brash trappings, if not the longevity, of a “Cheers”-style sitcom, and its generous humor is always in productive play with a tough, flinty realism.

Searching is nothing if not ambitious, and its rapidly accelerating second half is jammed with bold twists, red herrings and breathless confrontations. It’s also here that the movie begins to slacken its grip — partly because some of the twists beggar belief, and partly because they strain the limits of the online-all-the-time interface.

Madeline’s Madeline is the product of a lengthy, improvisation-heavy collaboration between Decker and her star, an astonishing teenage discovery named Helena Howard. It is also a skillful and imaginative blurring of fact and fiction, albeit one that insistently calls the act of such blurring into question.

Minding the Gap is an essay that never feels like an essay, an intelligent and compassionate grappling with some of the most painful issues presently haunting the body politic: toxic masculinity and domestic violence, economic depression and a deep, existential despair. But Liu doesn’t contrive a simplistic thesis on Middle American misery to suit himself and his friends.

Moselle’s movie is an empowering portrait of young women on wheels, but it proves no less surefooted when the wheels come off.

A story of implacable grief, unlikely companionship and stunning landscapes, Gavagai is as beautifully singular a movie as I’ve seen all year.

In a crisp, authoritative, sometimes startlingly vulnerable performance that never lapses into dragon-lady stereotype, Yeoh brilliantly articulates the unique relationship between Asian parents and their children, the intricate chain of love, guilt, devotion and sacrifice that binds them for eternity.

The Meg, stolidly directed by Jon Turteltaub (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “National Treasure”), winds up proving a fairly obvious theory about its chosen sub-genre: the more massive the shark (and the budget), the lighter the scares and the lower the stakes.

Christopher Robin finds ways to distinguish itself within its generic confines.

The emotional momentum...is carried along easily by Mozhdah, making a remarkable screen debut: In an instant, she can melt from trembling vulnerability to hair-pulling defiance, and in nearly every scene, we see her not just emoting but also thinking, continually renegotiating her position in a world that perceives her as tainted goods.

To say it’s all over the place, a frenzied collection of hits and misses, is to both capture its shortcomings and deliver a fairly cogent plot summary. But as directed by Susanna Fogel (“Life Partners”) from a script she wrote with David Iserson, the movie also has a playfully vicious screwball energy that consistently locates the violence in every joke, the humor in every kill.

Tsui tries to preserve that human element in fits and starts throughout “Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings” but to little avail.

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is loud, cheery and fairly relentless in its assault on your rib cage. The pleasingly rudimentary visual design, all bright colors and madly expressive eyebrows, is no more and no less than what the material requires.

An initially clever exercise winds up feeling like the wrong kind of hackwork.

Everything old is shockingly, stirringly new again in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the rare sequel so unexpectedly enchanting that it plays less like a rehash than a reclamation.

There is something about the calculation of Blindspotting, a movie all too aware of its own impressive ambition, that somehow resists the poetic abandon, the electrifying spontaneity that Estrada and his collaborators are trying to pull off.

Van Sant pays tribute to the restorative power of faith, discipline and perseverance, but he also resists the temptation to follow these themes into an overly pat or complacent groove.

Fisher neither wilts under the camera’s scrutiny nor succumbs to the temptation to stare it down. She gives precise form and delicate feeling to emotions and experiences that, despite the specificity of the circumstances, most everyone will recognize.

Johnson doesn’t get to pledge his love for unicorns and Molly Ringwald in this relatively straight-faced outing, but his versatility is more than intact: He’s a human wrecking ball, a human bridge and a human teddy bear rolled into one. He’s a towering Dwayneferno.

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.

For all its temporal twists and lyrical, sometimes remarkably photorealistic backdrops, Shinbo’s movie has none of “Your Name’s” narrative intricacy or stunning visual richness, much less its radical cross-gender empathy. These Fireworks look depressingly flat from any angle.

Deviations from the historical record aren’t a problem in and of themselves; it’s what those deviations add up to (or don’t), and what they say about the motivations of the artists behind them.

The tricky, twisty structure of this documentary, a scientific and philosophical inquiry by way of a detective story, suggests a joyous earthquake followed by a series of grim, unsettling aftershocks. It careens wildly from near-comic disbelief to unspeakable tragedy, dragging a trail of intense, contradictory emotions in its wake.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is a movie of deliberately low stakes and, for that very reason, enormous charm.

The trouble with this muscular, fitfully absorbing, confusingly titled action movie — a bigger, brasher and less memorable picture than its predecessor in every respect — is that its cynicism too often feels like a put-on.

There is no triumph or easy uplift here, only an urgent emphasis on Christ’s message of sacrificial love and a principled rebuke to anyone who would cheapen the gospel with politics — a conclusion that has lost none of its sting or relevance 2,000 years later.

Feste...has been known to elicit strong performances even from thuddingly obvious, maudlin material. But her attempts to establish an atmosphere of drab, low-key realism — evident in the dim lighting, wobbly framing and Laura’s penchant for rumpled plaid shirts — can scarcely conceal the essential phoniness of the material.

There is something inspired about the idea of fusing old-school aesthetic brio and revisionist politics, but the instant you see what Damsel is up to, its power begins to dissipate.

Among the movie’s more disquieting pleasures is the sight of this peerless actor — known for her ability to project an air of casual, chilly mastery over any situation — wilting under the mockery of her character’s unruly students, who treat her with only slightly more contempt than her colleagues do.

Superfly may be suffused with political fury, but it is also unapologetically awash in cheap, disreputable B-movie thrills.

Rather than defaulting to either condemnation or absolution, Nancy instead holds out the fleeting possibility of love to someone who has never known it before — and asks why we should begrudge her the impulse to seize it.

The sensationally gifted writer-director Ari Aster may tip his hat to the horror canon (“Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Shining”), but he has no interest in making a coy, winking exercise in horror pastiche. With breathtaking deliberation and quiet, unshowy mastery, he spins a devastating portrait of an American family in sudden, inexplicable decline.

What the movie refuses to do is dazzle, or resonate, or overstay its welcome, which is another way of saying it doesn’t really linger. As “8’s” go, it could stand to be a little crazier.

It’s possible to watch this movie, in other words, and feel that the series is carving out a new direction, returning to its ancient stomping grounds and sticking to a familiar holding pattern, all at the same time. Such is the repetitive, rudderless nature of so much big-budget franchise filmmaking, even with a proven talent like Bayona behind the camera.

If Upgrade ultimately plays like a genre exercise, it’s certainly a taut, engrossing one.

What seems at first like an ingenious and surprising dramatic strategy feels, by the end, like an evasion on the movie’s part, a refusal to grant its subject the unflinching honesty it deserves. A true story it may be, but no one should mistake it for a truthful one.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is an aimless, sweet-souled jumble. Its ebullience is palpable, if rarely infectious.

Exquisite and ferocious.

A tender ensemble piece whose skillful performances dovetail into a perfectly symphonic whole, Shoplifters is a work of such emotional delicacy and formal modesty that you're barely prepared when the full force of what it's doing suddenly knocks you sideways.

To call the movie a mess would be to state the obvious and perhaps miss the point. The movie’s sense of moment-to-moment chaos — madcap scenes of bellowing, falling, tumbling and general agitating — is scarcely accidental. It is, on the contrary, very deliberately achieved.

What's bracing about Sorry Angel is that it refuses to allow the specificity of its characters — specifically drawn and superbly played — to be obscured or flattened by the drama of terminal illness. Neither man is made nicer or more palatable than he has to be.

Burning is a character study that morphs, with masterly patience, subtlety and nary a single wasted minute, into a teasing mystery and eventually a full-blown thriller.

A sense of disorientation is a wholly appropriate response to a movie in which the past is both irretrievable and unshakable. But even at its most openly baffling, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” never loses its seductive pull.

For a movie about a fleeting moment, it leaves a surprisingly resilient ache.

It is an exquisite piece of filmmaking and also a blunt, pulpy instrument, a despairing, fully sustained howl of a movie that is easily this director's finest work in years.

Drawn from the director's personal memories of post-1968 excitement and disillusionment, the drama moves from surging emotional highs to melancholy lows, but it also pulses with a vibrant, moody energy that a 24-year delay from American screens has done nothing to diminish.

The result doesn't feel evasive so much as vaguely incurious, and its focus on the message over the man himself can be as impressive in its single-mindedness as it is frustrating.

Ehrenreich isn't given much to work with here, but his sly comic reserve and devil-may-care attitude give you reasons to keep watching, well after the story has stopped doing anything of the sort.

Pearce, in his feature directing debut, proves himself a solid craftsman, with a gift for giving even derivative story elements a nerve-jangling tweak. He also has a shivery way with ambiguity, a knack for toying with our expectations and turning the power of suggestion to his advantage.

Denis and her writing partner, the novelist and playwright Christine Angot, have woven a sublime comedy of sexual indecision. They mine Isabelle's affairs for humor as well as heartache, and do it with such delicacy that you may be hard-pressed to tell which is which.

It's one of the more viscerally accurate portraits of parenthood, and specifically motherhood, that the movies have recently given us.

Give yourself some time to adjust and Martel's style, at once immersive and disorienting, starts to feel like a corrective, a clearer way of seeing and hearing. The physical world here is not some abstract commodity; it is fiercely, palpably present, and utterly indifferent to the whims of men arrogant enough to think they can tame it into submission.

Whatever else it may be — a culmination, an obligation, a staggering feat of crowd control, a truly epic tease — Avengers: Infinity War is a brisk, propulsive, occasionally rousing and borderline-gutsy continuation of a saga that finally and sensibly seems to be drawing to a close.

The story is a faultlessly observed, broodingly intelligent piece of realism, a dispatch from a sun-baked frontier that could hardly feel more mundane or specific, but which Grisebach somehow suffuses with the beauty and power of myth.

It's a sweet, klutzy charmer, with moments of wit, insight and, yes, beauty, some of which it seems to stumble upon by accident.

If Young's work here is another master class in painterly under-lighting, then Pfeiffer's brilliantly self-effacing performance feels like something sculptural by comparison. Remarkably, she doesn't compete with the movie's rigorous visual scheme; she completes it. Her powers of expression, far from being obscured by all this darkness, are instead enriched and heightened by it.

It’s odd how effectively the movie winds up accomplishing what some of the best sermons do — heightening our compassion, stirring our emotions and intermittently earning our awe.

With its gorgeous frontier lyricism and its wrenchingly intimate story of a young man striving to fulfill what he considers his God-given purpose, The Rider comes as close to a spiritual experience as anything I've encountered in a movie theater this year.

What derails Blockers in the end is a curious lack of imagination, an inability to think beyond the raunch-com genre's most sentimental clichés.

The movie before us may be far from perfect, but with some crucial narrative and thematic tissue restored, it plays much more clearly, and satisfyingly, as an evocation of Ismael's emotional and psychological rupture, in his life as well as his art.

There is more to admire here than a simple economy of form and content, and the spareness of Ramsay's approach is no mere approximation of Ames' hard-boiled prose. The texture is as gritty as the filmmaking is exquisite.

It's a simple, cumulatively shattering record of life as we rarely see it captured in narrative or documentary cinema.

The pleasures of this story are the pleasures of watching people think, quickly but methodically, through a situation. To the very end, where a different picture might have devolved into a routine bloodbath, the movie clings to its intelligence like a protective amulet; it keeps the viewer in a state of heightened alertness throughout.

You might wish that the ending, and the story overall, had packed a bit more dramatic oomph, but Miller’s decision to keep the emphasis entirely on character and theme shows impressive confidence. He gives the movie all the juice it needs.

Duplass' puppy-dog affect may seem softer than you'd expect for a character who spent 20 years behind bars, but the actor's quietly wrenching performance gives the lie to any easy assumptions about the experience of the incarcerated. And Falco...gives a performance of aching depth and subtlety.

For Huppert, most celebrated for her uncompromising severity in films like "Elle" and "The Piano Teacher," the movie is an opportunity to cut gloriously loose; no less than Claire herself, she seems to be enjoying her holiday.

It is, in effect, a scrambled history of San Francisco told through moving pictures, a record of the social and architectural changes the city has endured over more than a century.

Pacific Rim Uprising...is an unquestionably dumber, slighter, less fully realized piece of work than its predecessor. It is also 22 minutes shorter and, though no less committed to an aesthetic of shattered glass and pulverized steel, a rather more endurable experience on the whole.

This is very much Foy's movie, and if the role of a woman trapped and surrounded by crazies couldn't feel farther removed from Queen Elizabeth II (or could it?), this superb English actress brings furious conviction to every agonizing moment of Sawyer's journey.

If there is a reason to cherish this often captivating, sometimes irritating, unavoidably perplexing movie, it's that its mere existence seems to defy rational explanation. It is by turns savage and soulful, mangy and refined, possessed of an unmistakable pedigree and yet boldly resistant to categorization. It's a shaggy Frankenmutt of a movie, dressed in artisanal fur and infested by bespoke fleas.

What makes Furlough such a wan, dispiriting experience is how indecisive and fundamentally timid it seems. Rather than subtly braiding drama and comedy together, as real life often does, the movie oscillates jerkily between the two modes, as though hesitant to commit to either one.

There may be little in this movie that you haven't seen before, but the perspective through which you're seeing it can make all the difference.

It's hardly the first or last time Hollywood has plundered one of its own long-dormant properties, but it's also a reminder that not every resurrection has to feel like a desecration.

The threat of violence churns beneath nearly every frame of this poised and coolly disturbing movie, but Finley's diabolical sense of mischief is held in check — and in some ways amplified — by his discretion.

By turns gorgeous, propulsive and feverishly overwrought, A Wrinkle in Time is an otherworldly glitter explosion of a movie, the kind of picture that wears its heart on its tie-dyed sleeve.

Directed by Eli Roth with the same knowing smirk that has informed his previous exercises in self-satisfied bloodletting ("Cabin Fever," "The Green Inferno," the "Hostel" movies), the movie is a slick, straightforward revenge thriller as well as a sham provocation, pandering shamelessly to the viewer's bloodlust while trying to pass as self-aware satire. Your time, to say nothing of your outrage, is much better spent elsewhere.

Within the confines of this cross-cultural shaggy-dog tale, Hirayanagi locates both a sharp vein of absurdist comedy and a bitter, melancholy undertow. She also has a deft enough touch to make one mode almost indistinguishable from the other.

Certainly you expect a good time from Bateman and McAdams, who give their banter just the right sly, sportive rhythm even when the lines and situations themselves come up short.

Its most impressive achievement may be how easily it welds the mechanics of genre and the cinema of ideas. Garland's movie has its grisly flourishes, but unlike so many thrillers that preoccupy themselves with spectacles of death, it's more interested in pondering the strange, inextricable link between creation and destruction.

With The Party, availing herself of a zinger-heavy script and an unimprovable cast, the director has made not only her most accessible picture to date, but also a shrewd demonstration of the less-is-more principle.

This exquisitely textured ensemble portrait is a gentler, more forgiving piece of work, not least because the filmmaker's jabs — and his sympathies, such as they are — feel more evenly distributed.

What gives the film its surprising coherence is not only the fluidity of Ozon's technique but also his mastery of tone, the ease with which he applies serious craft to a resolutely un-serious endeavor. The filmmaker's cackle is always audible beneath the story's glassy, deadpan surface.

The movie...resembles a sloppily tended garden plot where crude sight gags and violent set-pieces flourish like weeds, but anything resembling actual humor or delight refuses to take root.

If liberation is the endgame of Fifty Shades Freed, most of the time we feel trapped right alongside the characters, immobilized by the pointless, suffocating beauty and the stultifying dramatic inertia of the world James has created for them.

Narrative incompetence is one of the more venial sins of big-budget filmmaking, but there is something particularly ugly and cynical about the sloppiness of The Cloverfield Paradox, as if its status as a franchise stepping stone excused its blithe contempt for the audience's satisfaction.

No matter how many non-sequitur jolts they manage to squeeze into these jumpy proceedings, the ability to sustain a sense of dread, to create tension that lasts beyond the immediate moment, seems dispiritingly beyond their grasp.

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.

If Before We Vanish isn't nearly as focused or accomplished as Kurosawa's horror masterpiece "Cure" (2001), or as shattering as his magnum opus "Tokyo Sonata" (2008), it's nonetheless a reminder that he has few equals when it comes to spinning even the flimsiest B-movie template into a cinema of ideas.

Lover for a Day, which completes a thematic trilogy of sorts with Garrel's "Jealousy" (2014) and "In the Shadow of Women" (2016), is one of his more enchanting specimens.

What makes 12 Strong objectionable — and what will also make it appealing to some — is its attempt to induce a kind of amnesia in the audience, to ask that we forget about the subsequent moral and strategic failures of America’s “war on terror” or the limits of military retaliation when it comes to the pursuit of justice.

At a certain point, we are no longer watching a naturally escalating conflict so much as a rigged allegory of masculine aggression, contrived not only for our entertainment but also for our edification.

The Polka King doesn't have the dazzling ambition or energy of a great grifter classic. Instead she seems intent on nailing the details, on realizing Jan's milieu in all its tacky splendor, and trusting that our attention will follow. As in "Infinitely Polar Bear," Forbes has a gift for letting her production design tell the story.

It's an exquisite reminder of the wondrous things that can happen when a storyteller of boundless imagination avails himself of some rigorous discipline.

With the exception of one clever twist at the midway point, what transpires here is thin, vaporous and awfully derivative. But my goodness, how Shaye holds you, even through the most routine of jolts and the most ludicrous of circumstances.

What holds you throughout isn't just the picture's astounding craftsmanship but also its unsettling, exploratory vibe — the sense it conveys that you've seen something like it before, even as you assuredly haven't.

At 140 minutes, this movie qualifies as something of an endurance test.... But as endurance tests go, Molly's Game is also an incorrigible, unapologetic blast — a dazzling rise-and-fall biopic that races forward, backward and sideways, propelled by long, windy gusts of grade-A Sorkinese.

If Happy End is something of a bad-seed nightmare, it turns out to be an unpredictable one, marked by unexpected flashes of warmth, sympathy and blistering humor. (It's been a while since a Haneke movie left me cackling in horror rather than reeling in it.)

It's hard not to appreciate the visual and thematic scope of "Downsizing's" reach. But it's harder not to see the chasm between its strange, misshapen story and the grand, towering vision to which it aspires.

The trailer for Pitch Perfect 3 makes it look and sound like a comedy, which puts me in the unfortunate position of announcing that it is nothing of the kind. It's a tragedy in four-part harmony.

The Greatest Showman, for all its celebratory razzle-dazzle, in the end feels curiously lacking in conviction. Its pleasures, namely those Pasek-Paul songs, could be removed and repurposed for another story entirely, with no discernible loss in enjoyment or meaning...Its failures are rooted in something deeper: a dispiriting lack of faith in the audience’s intelligence, and a dawning awareness of its own aesthetic hypocrisy. You’ve rarely seen a more straight-laced musical about the joys of letting your freak flag fly.

If our understanding of the losses these characters have suffered feels incomplete, it’s hard to come away entirely unaffected as these men and women look back at their young adulthood and the whirlwind of historical change against which it played out.

Easily its most exciting iteration in decades — the first flat-out terrific “Star Wars” movie since 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back.” It seizes upon Lucas’ original dream of finding a pop vessel for his obsessions — Akira Kurosawa epics, John Ford westerns, science-fiction serials — and fulfills it with a verve and imagination all its own.

Harding’s story, in this overly broad retelling, is not especially strong on narrative density — or, for that matter, ambiguity.

Truths this scalding and plain-spoken need no such embellishment to be heard.

The story of how Wiseau turned his great cinematic lemon into zeitgeist lemonade is both heartening and instructive, but it also hints at darker secrets and unknowns that this movie’s upbeat dimensions can’t entirely capture.

If Yonebayashi’s movie doesn’t have the visual richness and imaginative depth of Ghibli masterpieces like Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” its emotional warmth and wondrously inviting hand-drawn imagery carry on that company’s proud tradition.

Toward the end of this searing, finally overwhelming film, it’s unclear which is the more disturbing realization: that Alyosha was lost long before he went missing, or that you don’t really want him to be found.

You could read Thelma as a saga of Sapphic liberation, a fiery critique of religious patriarchy or perhaps yet another superhero’s traumatic origin story; it’s graceful and ambiguous enough to support each of these readings. But the more possibilities the movie seems to entertain, the more its cumulative power seems to dissipate.

Guadagnino’s storytelling is overpoweringly intimate but never narcissistic. He directs our gaze both inward and outward, toward the treasures and mysteries buried within this Italian paradise, and also toward the unseen, unspoken forces that have threatened bonds like Elio and Oliver’s for millennia.

Try as you might to lose yourself in Coco, or pause to ponder its metaphysics, too often you find yourself hindered by the movie's breathless velocity.

On the Beach at Night Alone isn’t as accomplished as Hong’s 2015 collaboration with Kim, the masterfully bifurcated “Right Now, Wrong Then.” But it’s more than worth seeing for Kim’s exposed nerve endings alone, and also for the way in which Hong’s typically playful sensibility seems to tilt at times into a surreal, menacing strangeness.

[A] dense, disturbing and palpably angry new documentary.

There are moments here that arrest you with their hallucinatory power.

To a degree that is both formally impressive and politically astute, Rees and her co-writer, Virgil Williams, have largely retained the symphonic, almost Faulknerian structure of multiple narrators that governed Jordan’s story. The radicalism of Mudbound thus lies in its inherently democratic sensibility, its humble, unapologetic insistence on granting its black and white characters the same moral and dramatic weight.

If the movie’s form is a rich weave of grotty realism and soulful musical, the story itself is remarkably simple.

As cinema or literature, Murder on the Orient Express may be little more than a clever parlor trick. But in its final moments, even this overstuffed, underachieved movie offers a morally unsettling reminder that — with apologies to Chandler — the art of murder isn’t always as simple as it appears.

An excess of levity can quickly become its own kind of leadenness, and for long stretches between its genuinely amusing gags and set pieces, Thor: Ragnarok, credited to the screenwriting trio of Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost, is a bit too taken with its own breezy irreverence to realize when it’s time to rein it in.

The beauty of BPM, and what connects its hard-fought, well-remembered battles to those of the present, lies in its willingness to embrace life in all its messiness, its refusal to pretend that the personal isn't also political and vice versa. You may well weep at the end, but you might also feel like snapping your fingers.

Beneath its off-color jokes and curse-laden rants, Last Flag Flying offers a pointed consideration of the hard choices that Americans of all generations have made to serve their country, and of the betrayal they have felt when that country has not risen to the level of their sacrifice.

In the push-pull between Secareanu’s resonant stillness and O’Connor’s barely sublimated intensity, you feel the struggle of two souls forging a path toward each other, gradually realizing that while life may be harsh and unforgiving, love doesn’t have to be.

The Square means to send you out of the theater arguing, and its success on that front should not eclipse its more lasting, unsettling achievement. It affirms that art, this movie very much included, can tell us things about ourselves that we’d prefer not to know.

In filtering a ripped-from-the-headlines story through the prism of satire, Suburbicon winds up squandering much of its power. For all that the movie borrows from history, it conveys little in the way of truth.

As it marches its characters ever so slowly toward a suitably despairing climax, the movie feels increasingly like a self-satisfied but unsustained provocation, a rich display of craft in service of secondhand shocks and ideas.

A wretched waste of time and talent.

Faces Places turns out to be a road movie in more than a merely literal sense. It is at once a roving journey into environments we rarely see in cinema and an incomplete but invaluable map of Varda’s memories.

If you do see the movie, by all means surrender to its portrait of an earlier era of toxic celebrity culture, and also to the bracing nastiness of the central performances.

The Smiths may be working on a comparatively modest scale, but it’s precisely that modesty that gives their work its bone-deep authority and humanity, along with a refusal to indulge in violence for its own sake.

You may long for a more disreputable, less buttoned-up telling, but there is something about this one’s sleek, streamlined conventionality that feels both appropriate and pleasing.

Vaughn’s performance is riveting in its containment, and he honors his character’s ethos by making sure that every word, glance, gesture and silence counts.

It’s the tension between hardscrabble realism and buoyant fantasy — and the understanding that they are both, in fact, vital aspects of the same experience — that makes The Florida Project so powerfully unresolved.

The better one knows Stanton’s life and his movies, the more the long silences and gently meandering rhythms of Lucky resonate.

Not every historical drama has to be a masterpiece of verisimilitude, but in a movie about intelligence professionals whose very job is to analyze every detail and sniff out damning discrepancies, instances of visual and narrative sloppiness stand out all the more glaringly.

For all the anti-colonialist sentiments expressed in Victoria & Abdul...those criticisms are ultimately subsumed in a warm, troubling glow of British Empire nostalgia.

The movie is a straightforward, even familiar, tale of survival and recovery, but its grave respect for the unique extremity of its protagonist’s ordeal cancels out any impulse toward exploitation. It doesn’t make the mistake of assuming that your tears are its natural entitlement, which is precisely why you might find yourself shedding a few before it’s over.

It pulls off the impressive feat of feeling both hyperactive and lazy. This is hardly the first time a major Hollywood franchise has succumbed to narrative flabbiness, or invested in grand, elaborate world building with the kind of devotion that far outstrips the viewer’s interest.

Forcing their usual ethical query into the structure of a whodunit, the Dardennes have emerged with a narrative that, as compelling as it is, can also feel prosaic and even a bit predictable, especially in the overly aggressive melodrama of the closing scenes.

Starting from a single key insight into human behavior — the natural compulsion to compare oneself to others — White has spun a funny, empathetic and surprisingly grounded comedy that itself defies obvious comparisons.

The movie is a savage attack on the egomania that enables a director to fancy himself a deity, as well as the rotten patriarchies that govern the worlds of art, industry and religion alike, with Lawrence embodying the wise but perpetually ignored voice of the divine feminine.

While I’m generally inclined to applaud an action movie that seeks to be more than just an exercise in carnage, The Villainess turns wearyingly stop-and-go whenever it tries to fill in the void of its protagonist’s emotional and psychological history.

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.

Uncertain whether to be a cheerfully weightless killing spree, an earnest odd-couple comedy or, most hilariously, a straight-faced Eastern European political thriller, Tom O’Connor’s screenplay falls back on shopworn snark and half-baked bromantic attitudes.

Beautiful untruths and half-truths abound in Michael Almereyda’s quietly shimmering new movie.

The movie is a canny mixture of flash and grit, an unabashedly contrived Cinderella story in Dirty Jersey drag. And in Macdonald’s winning performance, it gets the hoop-earringed, heavy-set, frizzy-blond princess-to-be it deserves.

Bonello’s approach, always seeking to evoke rather than explain, doesn’t allow us either the clarity of analysis or the comforts of condemnation.

A certain exhaustion sets in well before the end, collapsing any meaningful distinction between camera-hogging self-indulgence and critical scrutiny.

The result may not be much more than an exercise in craft, a skillful demonstration of all the games you can play with long takes, moving cameras, blurred focus and cavernous pools of darkness. But craft is hard to overrate these days, and Sandberg’s technique, far from feeling assaultive or bludgeoning, has the effect of heightening your concentration.

At once a swift, relentless chase thriller and an exhilarating mood piece that recalls the great, gritty crime dramas of Sidney Lumet and Abel Ferrara, Good Time is also exactly what it says it is: a thrill, a blast, a fast-acting tonic of a movie.

The troubling whiff of nationalist sentiment doesn’t entirely blunt the force and sweep of Ryoo’s multi-pronged narrative, even when the story generally proceeds in fits and starts.

From start to finish, the movie exudes a stiff, joyless coherence.

What’s remarkable about this wondrously assured debut is that technique never overwhelms feeling, in part because Kogonada makes the two seem inextricably, harmoniously linked.

Atomic Blonde may be a delirious exercise in outré nonsense, but it can also be a brutally effective action picture when the inspiration strikes.

What makes Detroit vital is not that its images are new or revelatory, but rather that Bigelow and Boal have succeeded, with enviable coherence and tremendous urgency, in clarifying those images into art.

Brigsby Bear becomes a winning tribute to the joys of amateur filmmaking, one whose lovingly crafted sets and props recall the handmade sensibility and do-it-yourself spirit of other independent movies.

The mix of outrageous comedy and gentle sentimentality is familiar but very fresh, especially in the hands of four actresses who effortlessly establish a sense of shared history.

Provost’s movie jolts to life whenever its two great Catherines are sharing the screen, whether driving each other crazy or collapsing in tears.