Kimberley Jones

It’s an electrifying watch in its profound discomfort, and a testament to McKenzie’s ability to disarm with a smile, then land a righteous blow against the bad guys.

Much of the fun of The Christophers – and it is very fun – is in anticipating the hitches, then startling when they snag left rather than right. The delight is in watching Coel and McKellen play off each other.

Any SNL fan, and I am one, is still going to get a kick out of the close access and cavalcade of stars like Tina Fey, Chris Rock, John Mulaney, Paula Pell, and Paul Simon giving testimony. By dint of that access, Lorne is by definition revealing. Revelatory? Not as much.

A Rorschach test of a movie that reveals more about the audience than the characters onscreen. The Drama doesn’t just invite judgment; it’s coded in its DNA.

It’s all rather stunning to behold, especially in black & white, but Below the Clouds eloquently articulates the maxim that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That eye sees something very different from a safe remove. By and large, the people featured in Rosi’s documentary are in the path of danger.

Mesa Soto initially mines wry humor from Oscar’s sad-sackness; he and editor Ricardo Saravia are especially good at scene transitions that land like a punchline, and the marvelous Rios – small of stature and existentially slumped – cuts a comical figure. But the film, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes last year, subtly evolves (more successfully than Oscar, it turns out) to find just as much to scorn in the poetry center elites, and to nudge the viewer toward a more compassionate approach to its luckless sorta-hero.

The film tracks the laborious training process of how anxious, heartbroken Helen forges a bond with Mabel, and it’s fascinating stuff.

An undeniably novel film that nevertheless lost its novelty for me around the time the Shakers washed up on American shores (that’s about an hour in?), The Testament of Ann Lee still had me in its grip every time a musical number rolled around, which is often enough.

Anchoring all the wild plot machinations and shocking, garish violence is Wagner Moura’s focused and forceful lead performance.

Hamnet is at its best when exploring primal emotions, following the example of Agnes, with her elemental connection to the earth.

Sentimental Value lacks the giddy bracinginess of The Worst Person in the World; it’s a more measured, more meditative thing. It is also a return to form, of a sort.

Peter Hujar’s Day is a monument to the thrillingly mundane minutiae of living. I found it almost indescribably moving.

At just under two hours, Die My Love is a lot of movie with not a lot of story. Good thing, then, that it centers Lawrence in very nearly every frame.

For a film that gets right up close to a musical genius, it’s when he’s walking away, hands jammed in his leather jacket, that you can see the resemblance most clearly.

There are no life lessons here, only an uncommonly focused look at one life – the sometimes joyful, sometimes punishing day-to-day existence of a young man whose future is more uncertain that most.

It’s one of Roberts’ best ever performances, not in least part because of how confidently she wears her age and Alma’s secrets, now that her ingénue years are firmly behind her. The woman with the mile-wide smile is no longer interested in courting our favor.

It’s a dead-serious cautionary tale and sincere call for de-escalation, dressed like a political thriller by a director who’s aces with action (and whose actual best film, by the way, is Point Break). A House of Dynamite does not always easily straddle the gulf between docudrama and disaster movie conventions.

An impression is ultimately all that coalesces in 105 minutes, and I wonder if that has something to do with how little the film engages with his songwriting.

Lee makes the material his own, for better and for worse.

Writer/director Seth Worley is clearly having fun with the Amber-inspired monsters made real: They bear googly eyes and vomit sparkles before incrementally scaling up to more malevolent creatures that may test younger viewers’ mettle. But Worley is just as invested in the emotional nuance of the story, which meets each of its grieving characters at their own speed and shows them a lot of grace.

By film’s end, my cheeks were wet with feeling so many feelings for these young people just getting going. I am in awe of their boldness.

There are worse accusations to hurl at a filmmaker than that she has too much empathy for her characters, but in the case of Oh, Hi!, it stymies the potential in its provocative premise and holds a pretty good movie back from greatness.

Shot on location in Northeastern Massachusetts, chilliness hangs in the air of every frame, but Sorry, Baby – a uniquely special thing – is suffused with warmth.

Modestly scoped, sometimes sweetly dopey, and sincerely moving, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a charmer.

Materialists is messy in a good way – there’s a lot to chew on here, and Lucy in particular feels recognizably unresolved – but as good as Song is at succinctly compacting her characters’ past lives, I struggled to entirely understand what everybody in the present was thinking. That mystery might be fun on a first date, but as a romance, Materialists left me wanting more.

Just because Pavements is a prankish film about a prankish band doesn't make it any less deeply heartfelt. It’s one for the fans – and we are legion.

After 2023’s exalted Asteroid City, as raw and ragged with grief a film Anderson has ever made, anything was going to feel like a comedown. More charitably, The Phoenician Scheme is a palate cleanser – a lovely lark, a spirits lifter.

What it conveys, quite beautifully, is the essentialness in sharing your life with others, through joy and grief.

The Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee’s’ 1993 breakout feature, is actually an inspired vehicle to revisit.

Secret Mall Apartment – a seriously fun film – commits in kind.

If overly conventional, the film is so bursting with compassion, I felt like a heel any time I sniffed when the tone tipped toward corniness. Best to meet Bob Trevino on its own terms – with open arms and an unjudgey heart.

Sharing some of the same talent behind last year’s microindie critic’s darling Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Eephus is suffused with a sincere love for baseball but not overburdened with holiness about the game.

At a silkily dispatched hour and a half, Black Bag is perfectly portioned and entertaining as all get-out.

Pattinson is fully committed to the performance – performances – and his impact subtly evolves from giggling to genuinely moving. That same evolution applies to the whole of Bong’s film, which dances so close to the edge of grand folly, the effect is exhilarating.

Inspired by writer-director Kyle Hausmann-Stokes’ own experiences in the Army, including combat in Iraq, My Dead Friend Zoe tackles PTSD head-on with humor and empathy.

If Love Me wants us to consider the inner life of inanimate objects, that message gets muddled when we’re mostly looking at these two very alive actors.

Through the meat of the movie, I’m Still Here is unassailable: a gripping story, sensitively performed, with outstanding production and costume design effectively reproducing the era.

There’s humor here – Mike Leigh has always found something darkly funny in our shambling human condition – but Hard Truths is not an easy watch.

The film literalizes the damage done by the ruling class in ways that are shocking, but they land.

A dense, challenging piece, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is more associative than explicative.

Small in its movements and thoughtful in its observations, All We Imagine As Light is quietly resonant – so quiet you might wonder if it has much impact.

What struck me more was the film’s interpretation of Bailey’s coming of age not as something to be mourned or that comes on too soon. Instead, it’s an activation.

These characters have become so dear; I longed for something more climactic, more cathartic for them. Still, for the time we have with them, they make terrific company.

If there’s a complaint to be made about Look Back, it’s that there’s not enough of it: Adapted from Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto’s one-shot manga of the same name, the story it tells is purposefully contained.

If the cast blurs together, the expert costume and production design, filmed in lusciously retro 16mm, give the eye plenty to enjoy.

Picture scenes of excess followed by degradation, shame, teary promises of “never again,” resolve to start anew. Then the record skips and we’re right back to the beginning of the song, and it doesn’t sound any better on repeat listen. The Outrun hits similar beats, yet manages to do so in ways that feel novel at first, and ultimately transcendent.

Seeking Mavis Beacon is a dizzying product of our digital age. In its look and energy, which uses a desktop screen as an aesthetic and organizational device, the zigzagging film can have the feel of too many browser tabs open, emblematic of its wide-ranging but sometimes under-explored topics of interest.

Harper and Will both come off like good eggs, and the tears wept on both sides – about the decades of deep pain Harper felt denying her true identity, and the terrible realization for Will that he was blind to that pain – are liable to goose sincere tears of your own.

McKellen – now in his mid-Eighties, still sporting – hasn’t brought this kind of twinkling malevolence to the screen since his starring role in 1995’s Richard III, which coincidentally transposed its story of power grabbing and backstabbing to 1930s, fascists-rising England, the very same milieu of this acidic drama.

Indie filmmaker Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers, Terri) has assembled so many tender spots – sibling estrangement, dead moms, dying dads, the sad drudgery of hospice care, the messed-up family dynamics we reproduce in successive generations – that you might reasonably wrap the entire film in a trigger warning for anyone who’s ever had a family, full-stop. But it – his deft script, their aching performances – is absolutely worth the trauma watch.

I suspect where the plot goes will be polarizing; I’m not sure they landed the plane was my first thought when the credits rolled. But days later, Between the Temples has stuck with me. On the zoom out, I think it’s simply marvelous.

Out of a tight, terrific cast, it’s Collias’ performance – so alert and contained, its potency comes on later, like a time-release pill – that gets under your skin. It’s a star-making turn: not just a good one, a great one.

It Ends With Us pours most of its nuance into the beginning, middle, and harrowing climax of its central relationship.

It’s in this space that masculinity is interrogated, imagination is nourished, and these men get to be defined not by their past trauma but by their resilience and renewed capacity for joy. This is the space in which the empathic Sing Sing soars.

Just because the jokes about micro-dosing, Crossfit- and social media-obsessive city folk are a little obvious doesn’t mean they won’t resonate with any townie aching for the before-days.

It’s smart enough to gesture at current-day concerns – most especially in the dangers of a flexible relationship to truth – but not incisive or insightful enough to land a punch.

It leaves a lot of room for interpretation – depending on how you come to it, you could read Dog and Robot’s relationship as platonic or romantic, straight or queer – but the takeaway is all tenderness.

For neophytes, there’s still much to enjoy – cinematographer Steve Cosen’s painterly framing, exuberant scenery chewing (Linney makes a meal out of one vignette’s rotted teeth) – but the thematic resonance between story and storyteller gets a little lost when you’re only working off the reenactments’ CliffsNotes.

You think you’re watching a breezy-seeming comedy, then you’re seduced by two expert flirts, and then suddenly you’re genuinely stirred by a carpe diem monologue on the malleability of identity. I mean, what even is this? An absolute gas.

Generous and warm and howling funny, there is such a light touch to Babes, you might not even clock the depth of its observations – its inspections – of body and heart both.

Bouncy with enthusiasm and freely tapping their generous reserves of movie-star charisma, Gosling and Blunt perfectly embody the rhetorical question at the heart of this genuinely tender ode to the industry and its undersung practitioners: Aren’t movies the best?

Thoughtful and achingly empathetic – there is so much grace in these performances – We Grown Now occasionally tilts a touch too capital-A Arthouse Film.

This thing’s a journey, y’all – the miraculous coexisting with yawning boredom.

Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s fourth narrative feature – a soft kiss of magical realism here, a Keystone Cops caper there – is dreamily disorienting.

The title seems engineered to ride the tailwind of a Liane Moriarty suspense, but constitutionally, Wicked Little Letters is more of a cozy British mystery goosed with eye-popping profanity.

Filmed in magnificent monochrome with the kind of richness that reminds you black and white are colors too, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus will put you in a contemplative place.

There’s something a little pious about how resistant the film is to portraying Nicky not just as an admirable character but as an interesting one, too.

The film becomes a kind of meditative act.

It’s perfectly delightful.

Origin doesn’t always get there, but the effort is exhilarating. It’s the contact high of an artist really going for it.

Thrillingly airborne and a riot of color, Migration’s many scenes of flying are an absolute joy.

We see the work, the figurative (and sometimes literal) sweat that went into crafting these characters. It’s capital-M Movie Acting, and I couldn’t love it more. It moved me.

Scripted by Samy Burch, based on a story by Burch and Alex Mechanik, and citing head-spinning references from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona to Mike Nichols’ The Graduate to Hard Copy, May December moves a little like a dream, disorienting as the shimmering heat captured by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt.

It’s an ugly place to be stuck for two hours: a credible depiction of human nature at its worst, sure, but not an especially illuminating one. Still, there’s nerviness here, and undeniable skill. I’d like to see what Domont does next.

It’s all fairly unsubtle, and not infrequently flat-out silly, but I enjoyed its modest charms, especially in contrast to the bombast of Branagh’s previous Poirot pictures.

Truly, it is elucidating for folks who’ve never seen dementia up close, and guttingly familiar to those who have. But even more profound is the film’s record of a remarkable love.

In Passages, Sachs’ enthralling eighth feature, he and his regular co-screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias return to the more experimental bent of Keep the Lights On, echoing that film’s elliptical nature and naturalistic presentation of sex, its dizzyingly destructive relationships and Euro-arthouse affect.

Barbie, the toy, see-saws in the culture between extremes: Is she an aspirational figure, or the fastest way to f*ck up a kid’s relationship to her body? A gateway to the imagination, or a slammed door? Barbie, the movie – an exhilarating, generous, deeply handmade comedy about a mass-market product – revels in these extremes.

What the film itself is trying to communicate proves more elusive; whatever meaning Millepied meant to impart by tethering this “entirely new and unique artistic endeavor” to a century-and-a-half-old opera never quite made sense to me.

Tilting surprisingly dark – I suspect the film is at least in part about how we process trauma – but also somewhat impenetrable on first watch, it was another startlement when I realized I was crying. I can’t wait to go back.

Admirers of Hansen-Løve’s previous film, her English-language debut Bergman Island, may be surprised at how straightforward One Fine Morning is, how resistant it is to delivering a capital-letter Cinematic Moment.

By trying to give these women happy endings, or proposing fake reasons for how they came to produce indelible works, these alternative histories only achieve the opposite. They rob them of the truth of their lives.

This material is so rich probably any halfway decent filmmaker could assemble a competent doc tallying the two men’s extraordinary accomplishments. But only Lizzie Gottlieb could make a film where she does that plus needles her pop about wearing sweatpants for his sit-down interview.

She Said is a respectful, serious-minded effort that works so hard not to sensationalize the material, it works against its dramatic impact.

For all the fierceness of the elements, co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis, who previously collaborated on the well-regarded 2015 indie film The Fits, are in no rush here.

This pandemic-made feature teems with fertile ideas and observations – about social media, California Goopiness, reproductive trauma, feminist porn – that don’t always feel fully formed – more like purged – and her essential glibness undercuts the potential for real catharsis.

Spiritually, Official Competition’s closer point of comparison may be the films of Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), which similarly chronicle humans at their worst (gawwww, humans really are the worst) with visual wit and from a wry remove.

The film’s greatest strength is its unabashed sentimentality. The look on these artists’ faces – their obvious pleasure in being in the room with their heroes, making great music? It’s not just good on the ears; it’s good for the heart.

If tradecraft is what you like best about the espionage genre – the dead drops and dead-of-night tailings – then All the Old Knives will feel comparatively pokey, especially put up against the kind of spry spy entertainments long-form television so capably produces.

This heartfelt portrait, which brings the artist tantalizingly close, will certainly bring greater renown to Dalton. But she remains, stubbornly, unknowable.

For his part, director Stephen Daldry synthesizes the predominant beats of his film work, which has vacillated between feel-good awards bait (Billy Elliot) and feel-bad awards bait (The Hours, The Reader). Feel-good/feel-bad is Together to a T. It feels wonderful.

In fact, I liked wrestling with Nine Days, liked feeling the act of moviewatching as an active, not passive, one, and the way Antonio Pinto’s strings-forward score nudged my brain to stop churning long enough for pure emotion to kick in

Dwayne Johnson may not be the world’s most nuanced actor, but he’s a marvelous showman. His and co-star Emily Blunt’s combined “it” factor transcends the sillier stretches of this somewhat forgettable but still chuckling good-times ride.

The title, with its built-in weightiness ... well, it’s a tall order, one this latest Pixar animated feature falls just short of. The dominant mood here is not so much soulful as spirited, which is still better than most – and a most welcome gift.

It smartly skips the goofier aspects of the original, too. Once you’ve shed musical numbers and Eddie Murphy cracking wise as a dragon, you’re in far less jocular territory...And that feels right for the material.

Mostly it will just make you hungry to revisit Ashman’s work. That’s perhaps not the intended result of this fond tribute/merely serviceable survey of a too-short career – but it’s not necessarily a bad one.

The plot isn’t sturdy enough to fill two hours. An honorable mention, but no best in show.

Odom Jr. won the Tony for his performance here, a fact that’s been somewhat dwarfed over the years by Miranda’s tsunamic success, but the neat trick of this filmed version is to time-machine viewers back to an extraordinary moment in American cultural history – to put us, to borrow from Miranda, in the room where it happened. It feels like such a gift.