Leah Greenblatt

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The movie loses some momentum in the final third, and tends to over-egg its caricatures of all these platinum-card fools and clueless masters of the universe. But its appetite for destruction is also too much fun in the end to refuse: a giddy little amuse bouche for the apocalypse to come.

While a Black Panther without Boseman is undoubtedly nothing like the film's creators or any of its cast wanted it to be, the movie they've made feels like something unusually elegant and profound for the multiplex: a little bit of forever for the star who left too soon.

Wonder's spare, muted intrigue hangs mostly on Pugh and atmosphere, an elusive minor-key mystery.

As an all-in-one viewing experience, Bardo is undeniably uneven, often maddening, and seems to have approximately 17 endings. Still, the movie is a marvel in its own way, dotted with pure cinephile delights and small unexpected pockets of profundity.

Eric Appel's directorial debut essentially plays like a movie-length Funny or Die sketch — which it is, technically (or at least produced under that production umbrella): a giddy cameo-stacked satire propelled by murder, mayhem, Mexican drug lords, and athletic sex with Madonna. This is whole-cloth fantasy, of course, and that's the point: less Walk the Line than Walk Hard, with accordions.

This sprawling German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic WWI novel is a film that feels both aesthetically dazzling and full of necessary truths: an antiwar drama that transcends the bombast of propaganda mostly just because it's so artfully and indelibly made.

It feels like a faint insult to say that The Good Nurse could be a premium-cable product from long ago, one of those lightly prestige-y Sunday-night movies Showtime or HBO used to make. But it's also one crafted with sturdy, consummate skill, burnished by two Oscar winners who don't stint on their performances just because most people will end up seeing Nurse on a small screen.

Till-Mobley's choice to let the world see what Mississippi had done to her son — she demanded an open casket at his funeral — helped ignite a movement, and made history. Till bears stirring witness to that, even if it leaves the full measure of her life a mystery.

Luckiest Girl is the kind of rainy-day thriller Netflix was made for: lurid, entertaining, patently silly. It's also kind of a mess, though at least some of that likely comes from condensing the busy, grisly events of a best-selling book into less than two hours of screen time.

Triangle hits more marks than it misses, and in a somber, often underwhelming season of would-be arthouse hits, the movie is a bona-fide trip: not the funhouse mirror we need for these ridiculous times, maybe, but one we deserve.

As an acting showcase, Creatures is more than admirable; as a tourism ad for Ireland, untenable. As a movie experience, alas, it's both intriguing and teasingly incomplete.

Bacon is great fun as a girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown, chirping with increasing desperation that she's fine, and Finn is a pleasingly nervy stylist, letting the camera tilt and flip at seasick angles and ratcheting the tension as he goes. Smile is a pretty silly movie by any metric; still, it has teeth.

Compared to the tender groundedness of Baumbach's finest films, like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story, the scampering leaps and feints of his script here come off as deliberately arch, even artificial. The movie's final scene, though, without spoiling too much, is also easily its best.

Bros wears its queerness proudly, without stooping to cater overmuch to whatever elusive demographics might qualify it as a "crossover" success. But good comedy doesn't hang on pronouns or preferences; like this sweet, sharp movie, all it has to be is itself.

As an intimate, often infuriating portrait of an artist and era, it's hard to argue with the raw power of the story on screen — and the timeliness of it too, no matter how long overdue.

A sly fairytale about a medieval tween that manages to be both cheeky and modern without losing its heart.

[Perry] also has a way of making even the most telegraphed twists and overheated dialogue ring with conviction, a consummate entertainer to the end.

To be corny, which the film is decidedly not, it's about life: the brevity of it, the risks we do or don't take, who in the end we choose to share it with. And for all the pettiness, absurdity, and outright threats of violence, it's pretty feckin' wonderful.

It's nice to see actors like these do such subtle, sympathetic work for a gifted young director — and to find an outlet for storytelling that doesn't demand neat redemption, but still allows for grace.

Policeman, as emotionally earnest and elegantly made as it is, mostly feels like a movie we've seen many times before: a pleasantly escapist two hours with pretty people in pretty clothes, madly sublimating their feelings until the final, luminous frame.

Because it's Spielberg, it's all beautifully, meticulously rendered, and not a little glazed in wistful sentiment: an infinitely tender, sometimes misty ode to the people who raised him and the singular passion for cinema that shaped him.

The fighting, when it comes — from competing tribes, and from white colonizers steadily advancing an international slave trade — is viscerally satisfying too, even as the screenplay, by Dana Stevens (Fatherhood) and actress Maria Bello, works mostly in the broad strokes of genre storytelling.

Take away the people-eating, and it could almost be a Springsteen song. Which often makes it feel, in a strange way, like Guadagnino's most traditional film to date — a born provocateur's faithful ode to a classic cinematic genre, only with human gristle between its teeth.

The movie belongs to Blanchett, in a turn so exacting and enormous that it feels less like a performance than a full-body possession.

The movie, whatever its pile of ideas about love, gender constructs, and modern living, never really transcends Stepford mood-board pastiche. It's all nefarious and gorgeous, Darling, and strictly nonsense in the end.

Colman, her eyes darting between hope and devastation, is so lit-up and specific (and funny, a quality that doesn't seem to get mentioned enough) that she lifts nearly every scene.

There's a deep vein of humor and humanity that Polley and her actors mine from the text, and something quietly mesmerizing in their meticulous world-building.

Honk for Jesus shares a lot of Tammy Faye's small-screen feel and sense for winky episodic comedy; like that movie too, it's held together by the tensile strength of the petite, bedazzled female at its center. Awards-season gold probably won't strike twice in a row for pastor's wives, but Hall deserves some kind of prize for the soul she pours into this part.

It's a gentler, sadder movie than the dizzying trailer suggests, and less driven by plot than a stickler for storytelling like Alithea might prefer: a loopy little jewel-box reverie, slipped between two Furies.

A showcase mostly for Boyega and Beharie, whose tense, delicate interplay makes up much of the movie's emotional core.

Shift looks and feels low-budget, from its slapdash effects to its sketched-in script, though that also feels like kind of the point: It might be bright daylight, but it's always midnight-movie time somewhere.

Depending on your demographic, Bodies will probably either make you feel seen or utterly obsolete. But it's also just straight-up fun: a black-hearted comedy of manners meets contemporary social nightmare, written in blood and vape smoke.

Leitch embarks on a series of adrenalized set pieces that defy logic and physics so breezily that its relentless, ridiculous violence plays more like a winsome ballet.

They don't really make fairy tales for women over 40. If they did, though, it might look a little like Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris — a featherweight meringue of a movie so sweet it threatens to float away on its own sugar high, if not for the sheer generosity of the story's premise and luminous commitment of its lead actress.

Peele has never leaned this close to early Spielberg (or if you're feeling less charitable, mid-period M. Night Shyamalan).

A maximalist action thriller that is almost comically violent, unfailingly glib, and intermittently very fun.

At just under 90 minutes, the movie is as short and sweet as its stamp-size muse, but an uncommon loveliness lingers; Marcel might just be the most purely joyful, stealthily profound movie experience of the year.

Despite the source material's similar popularity, though, the movie drags, a confluence of silly plot points and mile-wide archetypes with too little natural chemistry between its ridiculously good-looking leads.

Even in Valhalla or Paradise City, though, there is still love and loss; Thor dutifully delivers both, and catharsis in a climax that inevitably doubles as a setup for the next installment.

In a movie that only nominally needs to make sense, those little mango-colored agents of chaos — with their thumb-shaped bodies, jaunty overalls, and inscrutable dialect ("Who are these tiny tater tots and where did they get so much denim?" Gru marvels in his own esoteric accent) — are often the best thing on screen, a loopy confluence of Buster Keaton and Evel Knievel.

Blunt but brutally effective little slice of supernatural horror.

The screenplay, by Matt Lopez, leans bright and broad, but there are sweetly specific moments scattered throughout, from a whisper-fight over dominoes at the local social club to the frequent snatches of Spanish woven into the dialogue.

Halftime is often hagiography, but a keen and sympathetic one too, designed to humanize a tabloid-headline life and remind us once again that where she comes from (the Block, the boogie-down Bronx) is as integral to her success as beauty or talent or sheer tenacity.

Writer-director Chloe Okuno has a remarkably sure hand for mood-building in her feature debut, using the winding alleys and tree-lined boulevards of Bucharest to woozy, enveloping affect. But she gives her star so few specific contours that Julia mostly comes off as a beautiful cipher and an increasingly maddening protagonist to root for, seemingly both paranoid and obtuse.

Tender teachable moments about racism or depression or midlife ennui ride alongside indie-pop needle drops and broad, breezy punchlines about tea-dance orgies and ketamine.

Sandler and Hernangomez have a sweet, goofy chemistry, somewhere between razzing and familial, and the on-court sequences are consistently electric. Hustle isn't reinventing the sports-story wheel; it's hardly even spinning it forward. But in the moment, they're having a ball.

The extremely game presence of actors like Zoë Chao, Veep's Sam Richardson, and This Is Us's Justin Hartley (as the dimpled bohunk she left behind) help anchor the chaotic wisp of a plot that follows, as does Wilson's barrelling, blithely crass energy.

There's a sneaky cumulative power to the filmmaking, though; if Happening often feels like a punch to the solar plexus, that's exactly what it should be.

Director Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy) revels in the sonic-boom rush of their many flight scenes, sending his jets swooping and spinning in impossible, equilibrium-rattling arcs. On the ground, too, his camera caresses every object in its view, almost as if he's making a rippling ad for America itself.

More disappointing, maybe, is how much the story takes Buckley's agency away as it goes on, her defiant, sharply defined presence in the first hour giving way to the bog-standard helplessness of every woman trapped in a horror movie. Men's eerie, encompassing mood lingers; the rest is a mystery.

Give Sam Raimi a multiverse, and he will take a mile. The director's take on Doctor Strange feels like many disparate and often deeply confusing things — comedy, camp horror, maternal drama, sustained fireball — but it is also not like any other Marvel movie that came before it. And 23 films into the franchise, that's a wildly refreshing thing, even as the story careens off in more directions than the Kaiju-sized octo-beast who storms into an early scene, bashing its tentacles through small people and tall buildings like an envoy from some nightmare aquarium.

The heir himself turned out to be a naïve and troubled young man, though Strickland leaves his particular fate a mystery until the final moments of the film. What's in between is unevenly executed but still compelling: a far-out cautionary tale of money, media, and gonzo idealism gone wrong.

Navalny has a bracing, heart-racing story to tell, even as the improbable facts rush past. But it never fails to focus on the human man: funny, prickly, and unimaginably brave, down to the last defiant frame.

Sciamma's elegant, melancholy fable captures something lovely and ineffable: a brief glimpse into life's great mystery.

A New Era is strictly high-toned formula, from its God's-eye opening over spire-tipped turrets and green-velvet lawns to its soft-focus finish, but it feels like home.

Cage, so great and unexpectedly subdued in last year's small-scale indie drama Pig, has a ball with his own myth-making, a star contracting and expanding in the movie's fun-house mirror of fame and destabilized celebrity. Not that he ever went anywhere.

The story belongs to its young cast, and Lords' ramshackle comedy sweetly captures the rank anxiety, random humiliations, and undiluted hope of being young.

Watch it sincerely or as a curiosity; at least you know you won't forget it.

A love triangle, or maybe something more like a love polygon, lies at the center of the slight but alluring latest from Parisian writer-director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, The Sisters Brothers) — one of those supremely French films in which impossibly chic people fight, come together, and fall apart, all filmed in saturated black and white.

Beneath the runes and visions, it's a tale as old as Game of Thrones, and as simple as a story told around a campfire: a ride of the Valkyries spelled out in gore and popcorn.

Dumbledore feels like an improvement, at least, on the joyless, enervating slog of 2018's Crimes of Grindelwald; it's nimbler and sweeter and more cohesive in its storyline. And the cast, less trapped in a fug of half-formed symbolism and subplots, are allowed realer and more romantic stakes.

Pine and Newton work valiantly to fill in the blanks, though the gray-flannel template of the dialogue often pushes back. When they do manage to transcend it, the movie becomes something still rare enough to appreciate: an urbane thriller calibrated for slow burns and analog attention spans.

The violence is cartoonishly casual and the ending pure Hollywood corn. The absurdity, though, is the point: They're just two brothers on the run, and escape is what we came for.

Swedish-Chilean director Daniel Espinosa (Life) gives it all a dark sheen, and shoots the pair's inevitable confrontations less like traditional comic-book clashes than something from The Matrix.

Nothing in Lost City would really hang together without its main pair, whose chemistry movies like this inevitably live or die on.

The actors, particularly the inexhaustible Yeoh, do much of the work to ground what often feels, with its dream logic and layer-cake Inception feints, like a coded story whose secret key you haven't been invited to share.

For all its earnest sentiment and questionable science, though, Adam barrels along on movie stars and charm, from futures past and back again.

In the tricky world of tween-dom, it captures something sweetly universal: Growing up is messy, no matter how you bear it.

Like its muse, the movie feels a little like a black-box experiment, one that can be both frustratingly opaque and achingly lovely: a still-waters mystery whose ripples, even up to the last frame, only hint at what lies beneath.

It falls on Pattinson's leather-cased Batman to be the hero we need, or deserve. With his doleful kohl-smudged eyes and trapezoidal jawline, he's more like a tragic prince from Shakespeare; a lost soul bent like a bat out of hell on saving everyone but himself.

In a post-Knives Out world, is a movie like this meant to be a classic whodunit for the whole family, or something more deliberately meta and modern? Branagh mostly lands on the former: a sort of sumptuous dinner-theater redux studded with stray bits of caricature, camp, and many CG pyramids.

Pay no attention to the shades of late-night cable in the title; Speak No Evil is a lamentably generic name for a movie as stark and unsettling as Christian Tafdrup's queasy, inexorable thriller.

Ford imbues his story with a tense, vibrating energy, moving briskly between the breathlessness of a heist thriller and the sharper barbs of social satire.

Thompson is, unsurprisingly, a force: alternately brittle and vulnerable and mordantly witty, her whole body vibrating with a lifetime's worth of sublimated desire.

Cha Cha feels like both a fitting showcase for a young auteur like Raiff and a larger marker of how much movie masculinity has evolved: a real-smooth manifesto for the anti-toxic man.

Cave has a smart, stylish way of storytelling that somehow makes a film built on bone saws and grotesqueries feel almost breezy.

Adapting the script from his own 2020 audio play, Eisenberg treats his cast with measured acidity, drawing out their snarky moods and narcissistic missteps without mocking them too cruelly; you may not particularly love these characters, but that's no match for how little they like themselves.