Keith Uhlich

More than any other Jim Jarmusch film, Father Mother Sister Brother is haunted by mortality and the inevitable passage of time.

The drama is all surface, in other words. And what a surface, for sure. A literal life and death struggle that’s exceedingly of this moment. Yet the best documentaries tend to have formidable underlying narratives working in concert with their overlying ones.

The late Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play isn’t opened up so much as clinically dissected by the film, with every character an enfeebled pawn in situations they’re at a loss to resolve.

There are plenty of real-life anecdotes that Scott Cooper draws from Warren Zane’s 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, but they’re filtered through the hoariest of biopic clichés.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark comedy One Battle After Another turns overreaching into an art form.

Robert Eggers’s sublimely severe remake of the oft-told tale of a bloodsucker wreaking unholy havoc is less a composition for full ensemble and more a moody piece of chamber music, equally as orchestrated as the Murnau, but uncomfortably intimate in its effects.

In the end, Luca Guadagnino effectively turns a very complicated literary figure into the kind of blubbering, nostalgic old man you’d expect to see in a student film or a Sundance prizewinner.

The film is a handsomely mounted production in which much of the filth feels stage-managed.

Think of Chris Nash’s film as Béla Tarr doing an unholy doc-fiction hybrid about Crystal Lake.

The film attests to George Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.

The film knows the words and tunes but, with rare exception, lacks the passion and the perspective to make them truly resonate.

For all the unbridled destruction, Godzilla Minus One remains perversely light and fun, a Roland Emmerich-like disaster flick helmed by an actual talent.

That liminal space between the peaks and the valleys of a person’s life is what Michael Mann is most interested in exploring.

The genre trappings are familiar, but this isn’t any old horse opera.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a three-hander on an epic canvas, a corrosive analysis of America’s colonialist and capitalist excesses as refracted through a marital melodrama in the vein of George Cukor’s Gaslight or Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.

Bertrand Bonello uncannily utilizes burdensome signs and wonders for maximum insight and agitation.

The story is kept at a stress-inducing simmer, with occasional surges of operatic emotion.

It’s nonetheless the very slipperiness of Sakurai’s passion — to humbly become the god he worships — that continually compels.

[Chazelle’s] torturously glib cynicism is quite the attitude around which to build an epic boondoggle of this sort. Equally as heinous is the 11th-hour optimism that he then attempts to tack onto Babylon via a jaw-droppingly wrongheaded climactic montage.

For all the genuine thrills provided by its pioneering pageantry, Way of Water ultimately leaves you with a soul-nagging query: What price entertainment?

The film is an illustration of the transition from the ethical pliancy of youth to the moral discernment of adulthood.

Both Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are sadly at a disadvantage given how many of the older actors gnaw at the scenery like it’s a still-warm cadaver.

In Claire Denis’s film, sex is the great equalizer, or at least the act that allows people to defer taking a firm moral or ethical stance.

The film is consistently compelling visually and aurally, but neither Todd Field nor Cate Blanchett seem quite decided on whether Tár’s comeuppance is a grand tragedy or a cosmic joke.

Where the love story was a means-to-an-end afterthought in the first Matrix, it’s now the crux of the tale, and the emotional undercurrents are so intoxicating that it more than makes up for the relative inelegance of the action scenes.

Getting old, as Jackie and Don would have it, is part of their overall project. More than once they talk about the impermanence of the materials they use. One day, their art will cease to be, as will they. That Zen pronouncement doesn’t make the day-in/day-out drudgery of aging any easier.

This Bond’s overall arc from modishly merciless killing machine to aging assassin with the familial feels comes off as a treacly sop to psychological complexity.

What’s absent here is the murderous lust for power that dovetails with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s lust for each other, and which proves their mutual undoing.