K. Austin Collins

It isn’t remotely surprising that a political film can be gut-splitting entertainment; if the legacy of the American Western proves anything, it’s this. But Bacurau doesn’t merely reflect that legacy. It outdoes it.

It manages to be about a great many things—but above all, it’s a movie about two men, two bodies, and the masculine, economic codes of the West. Which, in retrospect, feel so much more moveable and introspective than our usual depictions of the period allow.

It’s a fine movie: cute, clever, moving, and engagingly-told, an altogether painless confirmation of what we should all agree is Pixar’s basic aptitude for keeping kids’ asses in seats and parents from pulling out their hair.

I don’t find Bonello cold. I find him alert, alive, and frequently inspired—if unexpectedly limited, at times. Zombi Child amounts to a curiously fragmented display of his talent. But much of the good stuff is here.

Somehow, a James novella whose subtext has been debated for over a century has been rendered almost free of subtext—and it sort of works.

If In Fabric is initially hindered by the literalism of Strickland's vision, it still manages to prove irritatingly suspenseful, at times even pleasurably shocking.

The mysteries of Atlantics, and there are plenty, are rooted in the question of what the lives of those men were worth—and of what, just as urgently, the life of a young woman like Ada might be worth, accordingly. But Diop’s approach to that question is elliptical, borne of a plot that mixes genres, religious superstitions, and the modernity of the cell phone age, into something wily and unpredictable.

Jewell, to its credit, is anchored by one of the more complex heroes in Eastwood’s canon. But I’m still not certain it finds the most cutting or convincing path through this story.

The film never obscures what it’s about. This is, after all, the story of a martyr. But because it’s recounted by a director whose cosmic visions are deliberately meted out through the most minute details, things most other films overlook—the ephemera of everyday experience, the gestures, glances, and sudden flights of feeling that define us without our even recognizing them in the moment—it all feels that much more particular.

There are personal fragments of interest here; it’s useful to see how a man like Bannon narrates the story of himself, mythologizes himself, if only for the glimpses of worldview that sneak through in his presentation of the details. But the failure of Morris’s film is that it snuffs so much of that out.

The purpose of the fine-grained emotional details keeps getting scrubbed out of Waves as its runtime wears on and reconciliation feels increasingly imminent. The observations are sharp, but the attitudes and arcs that they paint feel overly simple.

It doesn’t have the polish or prestige of your typical Oscar movie ... But there’s a tension at work in Harriet that’s missing from other, “better” movies. ... It’s also a vaster and in many ways wilder film than it will get credit for, a movie that leans into the excitement of Tubman’s mission so energetically it almost morphs into a heist picture, dredging up odd romantic and religious energies along the way.

Jojo Rabbit has little to say about any of the things it dredges up, beyond the obvious.

It feels at times like a Tracy Jordan spoof of a movie, and not always for the better. But that doesn’t stop Dolemite from being funny, or from giving Murphy room to do the things he likes to do.

[Green has] made a powerful movie about the ways power enforces silence, even between assistants and other underlings—people convinced they have everything to lose. It’s a movie about the tragedy of being brought into the fold and conditioned into that silence. And it’s a movie about how a person feels when they believe they have nowhere to go.

There isn’t truly standout work from anyone in the cast, even if the cast is what makes the movie work when it does work. Thank God for Hader’s unassuming sense of humor, Ransone’s jitteriness, Chastain’s steely, intuitive resolve.

Uncut Gems is a movie that lives in the gut, where shit makes a name for itself, where anxiety, folly, and instinct are borne out without morality or restriction.

I admire Zellwegger’s performance most of all for risking outright broadness, even badness, to chip away at the truths of the star’s persona. Frankly, it’s a performance that threatens to fly free of the movie enclosing it, which is well-made but not nearly as compulsively odd as its star.

One Child Nation does not flinch from critiquing mass complicity and the broader cultural logic—specifically the indoctrination into party politics—undergirding it.

The realities documented here would seem to merit judgment from filmmakers so clearly invested in the subject. But the film itself feels noble, gentle.

Yesterday isn’t nearly as fantastical, sweet, or light on its feet as it could be—and maybe that’s because of that darn premise. It’s somehow both too basic and too rich. There’s too much one could do with it, but too little vision in what Boyle and Curtis ultimately put forward—even as real tensions, real sticks in music history’s craw, populate the margins.

A strange, uneven, but ultimately effective satire of masculinity.

Honeyland is thankfully too interested in the particulars of Hatidze to reduce her to demographic trivia. What matters, the movie tells us, isn’t that she’s exceptional in the trivial sense, but that’s she’s exceptional in who she is. Another message, to be sure, but one that finally rings true.

The difficulty of The Mountain is the growing sense that its sinewy, thoughtful style may tip over into outright preciousness—which is exactly what happens.

The Lion King, ultimately, is simply a copy—not a true remake. It’s exactly the movie Disney wanted to make, which is good news for them—but a shame for us.

Smith is the lifeboat leading us to a more pleasurable film, one where it doesn’t so much matter that the sets look cheap, to say nothing of the CGI keeping Smith’s head plastered on a floating blue body.

The documentary isn’t a masterwork of craft, but in the interviews, there’s always a glimpse of some broader story, be it the electric charisma of the women in the crowd, who are frankly just as fun to watch as the performers, if not more so, or the broader arcs of history and tradition.

The displacement Jimmie feels pervades most every shot of Talbot’s film and gives it all a slow-churning aura of foreignness and melancholy, a diasporic sadness that’s interesting to see in the context of a film about an African American, rather than a recent immigrant.