Leah Greenblatt

Globe-trotting tomfoolery ensues, in ways never quite as witty or engaging as you want them to be, though Hugh Grant and Josh Hartnett bring a certain insouciant zing.

With its English subtitles and small-scale epiphanies, Girl is the kind of quiet film that could easily get lost in a noisy season; lean in anyway, and listen.

It's all patently ridiculous, and even at 95 minutes, a stretch to call this loose cannonball of high camp and sticky-bright gore a movie.

Majors, already seemingly inescapable this year, brings a wounded menace that suggests the many sedimentary layers of fury and grief underneath; he's less some sneering Iron Curtain meathead á la Rocky villains of yore than a lost soul.

There's something gently intoxicating about O'Connor's dreamlike pastoral settings — oh, those wily, windy moors! — and her determination not just to rewrite Emily, but set her free.

At just over 120 minutes, though — a blink in Marvel time — this Ant-Man is clever enough to be fun, and wise enough not overstay its welcome. Who better understands the benefits, after all, of keeping it small?

There's a low-key charm to the movie's knowing spin on familiar beats, and far more chaotic non-sexual nudity than Julia Roberts would ever allow in her contract.

It's easy to lose count of the double and triple crosses in Sharper, a silly and unabashedly camp thriller that is, frankly, exactly the kind of sleek, shenanigan-y frolic that bleak midwinter calls for.

What should be breezy, featherweight fun — Reese! Ashton! A screenplay by the lady who wrote The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses! — instead turns out to be oddly hollow, a meandering and synthetic approximation of classic rom-com canon with too little romance or comedy in its strained, familiar formula.

Last Dance is missing a lot, but it has the moves you mostly came for — and in its final strobe-lit moments, the full release of a Hollywood ending.

Shyamalan may be saying something meaningful about faith or environmental destruction or the corrosive fraying of the social contract (could this vigilante crew really be motivated by pure homophobia, as Andrew believes?). But the message is mostly lost in sentiment, and a lingering sense of the better, messier movie that might have been.

Ejiofor is eminently relatable as an analog man who can't seem to understand where it all went wrong, and Clarke's eyebrows knit with such pained expressiveness, it's as if they're having their own wriggling monologue throughout the movie.

Shot in alternating French and Flemish, it's also quintessentially European, but the language of his storytelling is the most universal kind: a moving and often sublime piece of small-scale filmmaking, told with uncommon empathy.

The movie is much better when it relaxes its death grip on screenwriter-y punchlines and slapstick cringe and just allows its cavalcade of stars to act like actual, you know, people.

This Wedding clearly wasn't meant to be a masterpiece, but even as mid-winter fluff it feels like a rush job: a marriage made for lazy-Sunday streaming at best, 'til death — or more likely, a better script — do you part.

By swerving into territory already better owned by outrageous indies like Promising Young Woman — and to a lesser degree, last year's Sundance breakout Fresh — Cat forfeits its own underlying message, without finding anything else new or even particularly coherent to say.

Directors Nick Johnson and Will Merrick sometimes strain the credulity of what shooting in-screen can do — June's laptop camera does a lot of heavy lifting — but the movie rarely feels forced or claustrophobic; it's just a whizzing, cannily of-the-moment spin on a familiar genre, reupped for the Genius Bar age.

Even as the pacing falters, Majors is impossible to look away from: a man who desperately needs the world to see him — and if they refuse, to feel his pain.

Until [Cooper] loses his way in the cascading absurdity of the final twists, though, the movie is mostly a study in how good its two main actors can be: Bale's soulful, hollow-eyed conviction, and his odd-couple chemistry with Melling, isn't quite enough to sell The Pale Blue Eye's loopy improbabilities in the end, but it's still a pleasure to watch them try.

The tart in-jokes and absurdity of the script, its winky acknowledgment of all the tropes gone before it, feels like a delirious cap on recent genre hits like Barbarian and Malignant.

Boogie had a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame. Chazelle often steers his characters toward tragedy or anguish, without ever quite rooting his inscrutable thesis in anything real.

The movie's overt themes of familial love and loss, its impassioned indictments of military colonialism and climate destruction, are like a meaty hand grabbing your collar; it works because they work it.

There's something lovely and quietly profound about where the film finds itself in the end: a generational love story that transcends old wounds and misadventures, and even, in its tender final moments, death itself.

[Smith's] conviction carries Emancipation a long way, elevating what is essentially a B movie to the realm of something better than its outsize premise: a blunt instrument, maybe, but a brutally affecting one too.

Glass Onion doesn't feel like a movie that's meant, really, to be peeled. It's here strictly to dazzle you with money and murder and famous-people pandemonium, then sharpen its knives for the next installment.

An unabashedly heady romance, rich in pretty costumes — when they're wearing them — and lush, lusty atmosphere.

Powell and Majors, both born with surfeits of natural charisma, strain mightily to imbue their scant dialogue with deeper meaning, but Devotion, earnest and determinedly earthbound to the end, never really captures the air up there.

It's faithfully acted by an earnest, intelligent cast, and directed with fervent purpose by Maria Schrader. But the result, for all its galvanizing, well-oiled plot machinations, remains consistently earthbound, and often frustratingly schematic, a movie so bent toward education and edification that it feels a little bloodless in the end — human tragedy as PSA.