Leah Greenblatt

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.

Both directors have made much better movies; go watch one of those instead.

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.

It's all cream puff, a featherweight fairytale too shiny and mild to attempt the better movie about midlife romance and second chances that might have been.

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.

The movie's final frame asks us to believe that Sarah Jo has finally, ecstatically found herself; by then, whatever reason we have for watching is already long lost.

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.

Worst has no shortage of gorgeous-people problems — more than enough, in fact, to fill 12 cinematic "chapters" — but it vibrates with real life, a film so fresh and untethered to rom-com cliché it might actually reshape the idea of what movies like this can be.

Even as the story's inevitable reckoning descends, Farhadi allows his modest morality tale to take on a note of battered, ambiguous hope: a cautionary fable whose purest notes ring poignantly, painfully true.

Without much dramatic tension beyond the will-he-or-won't-he of Cameron's final choice, the film feels oddly inert, a melancholic iPhone ad stretched to feature-length.

The real draw is Dinklage: with his mournful eyes and crooked smile, he's the tender, towering soul of Cyrano.

The way that the movie eventually manages to bridge all those multiplicities and pull them into focus feels both obvious and ingenious.

Frankly, it's almost enough just to watch them all run around in states that range from manic panic to Zen serenity while McKay employs his usual coterie of meta tricks and treats. But it's hard not to long for the shrewder movie that might have been: Not just a kooky scattershot look, but a deeper truer gaze into the void.

There are more cohesive coming-of-age movies to be sure, and subtler ones. But God doesn't really try too hard to make it all make sense; it's just one boy's dolce vita, drenched in Mediterranean sun, hormones, and salt air.

Nightmare Alley is both a beautiful-looking film and an oddly forgettable one, maybe because borrowed material is no match for the ingenious creations of del Toro's own mind.

It feels like a rare achievement to even attempt to scale the unscalable and still, after more than half a century, be able to make it sing.

Licorice (the title, never once mentioned or explained, remains a happy non sequitur) is a love letter to an era, and more than that a feeling: a tender, funny ramble forged in all the hope and absurdity of adolescence, one wild poly-blend rumpus at a time.

The cast's chemistry never quite gels beyond their staged circumstances, and too much of the dialogue replicates actual life without finding a deeper resonance: the rambling anecdotes, latent passive aggressions, and aimless small talk of ordinary people just living their lives.

Gucci might have been a better movie if it had fully committed to the high camp its Blondie-soundtracked trailer promises. It's more serious than that, at least intermittently; a strange melange of too much and not enough. The script also skimps, weirdly, on the actual murder, which is treated mostly as a framing device and felonious afterthought until the final moments. But even a House divided is still more fun than it probably should be: a big messy chef's kiss to money and fashion and above all, movie stars — criming and scheming like they have nothing left to lose, until it's true.

For all its eerie scene-setting and squishy entrails, Antlers never really exposes the emotional guts of its narrative beyond the scope of midnight-movie horror; without that, it's just another nightmare fairytale leaning hard on heavy vibes and jump scares, and losing the forest for the trees.

For all the outsize fight scenes and casual profanity though, the whole thing is oddly bloodless. (Even a rampaging bull hardly leaves a bruise.) And so Red Notice goes: blithely skimming through its slapstick fantasy, and laying bejeweled eggs wherever it lands.

Nothing in Souvenir Part II is obvious; one could argue it's even obtuse to the point of excluding most casual moviegoers. But surrendering to Hogg's slow alchemy still feels like a rare treat: a beguilingly meta portrait of the artist as a young woman learning to find herself not just in the mirror of others, but in her own hand behind the camera.

Soho is one hell of a half of a movie: a wildly styled neon reverie whose spooky bedazzlement only crashes to earth when it succumbs to bog-standard horror in the final act.

The looping flashback structure and relaxed, intimate pacing has the odd effect of making the fate of the free world feel a lot less urgent than it probably should; the movie frequently comes off less like a standard MCU tentpole than a metaphysical family drama whose black sheep just happens to be Thanos.

The film can't seem to stop piling on idiosyncrasies, a kind of willful kookery that mixes uneasily with the more serious elements of personal tragedy and mental illness that run through it.

The movie's stark Nordic mood and obscure mystery are as coolly immersive as nearly anything on screen this year — and in the hammy world of supernatural horror, that ambiguity alone feels like a small, spooky gift.

Duel is entirely, often sensationally watchable without ever quite justifying why it needs to remind us what the world has done to women for centuries.

Rocket is leisurely episodic and at over two hours, almost certainly longer than it needs to be, but the director's singular gift for street casting — beyond Rex, hardly anyone here has acted professionally before — and deeply embedded sense of mood works its own kind of unhurried alchemy.

If we're all disposable space chum in this franchise game anyway, who needs a coherent narrative and character arcs? Just bite the head off every chicken, and lean in.

The levity of the first half is soon sorely missed, and the run length alone — the movie clocks in at just under 165 minutes — dilutes the intended emotional resonance of the final scenes; Never Say Time might have been a truer title.

In an era when nearly everything that can be done on film already has been, Titane forges something sensational from nerve and pure metal, and makes it new.

Saints can't be what Sopranos was — without the time or the ones who've been lost to tell it, fuggedaboutit. But for a hundred-something minutes, it feels close enough to coming home again.

Laurent, an actress known Stateside for movies like Inglorious Basterds and Beginners, has adapted Ball from the bestselling novel by Victoria Mas, whose facts are rooted in actual history. She shares Mas' justifiable outrage at the casual inhumanity of it all — the brutal experiments and biased theories, the rampant physical and emotional abuse — and also her sense for melodrama.

Riz Ahmed takes Encounter a long way. But he can't single-handedly carry a film that never quite figures out what it wants to be — stark sci-fi paranoia? Psychological family drama? Desert road-trip apocalypse?

Guilty, for all its wild-eyed excess, does find some blunt-force propulsion for a while, particularly if you're coming to it new. But the movie seems to mistake the taut minimalism of the original for something that needs to be goosed and adrenalized, a thriller on constant defibrillator.

Comes drawn in bold, broad strokes — a fond treatment of a flawed but fascinating American icon whose revelations feel mostly cosmetic in the end.

Subtle it's not: Kate is red-meat storytelling, all broad outlines and crunched bones. But there's a visual wit and visceral energy to it that other recent efforts (the pop-feminist comic-book gloss Gunpowder Milkshake, also on Netflix, and Amazon Prime's spectacularly silly Jolt, featuring a rampaging Kate Beckinsale) struggle to find.

Unless you're one of the few who's read Thomas Savage's 1967 book of the same name, on which the script is based, there's rarely a moment that doesn't feel racked with the queasy, thrilling promise of sudden violence or epiphany.

Green (who made the small, affecting 2018 indie Monsters and Men and this year's little-seen Joe Bell) hasn't reinvented the underdog wheel, but he has made something fresh out of the familiar — a smart reminder that when a story is told well it can hit all the beats we know, and still somehow surprise us.

Branagh's genuine affection and nostalgia for his subject suffuse the movie; if only the misty romanticism of his story could match it.

Another rich creation in Mills' bittersweet, gently profound collisions of art and life.

Dispatch often feels like the filmmaker in concentrate form, both his best and worst instincts on extravagant display.

The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution — there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art — often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end.

Even within the stagy confines of the movie's Scenes From a Marriage setup, Horgan and McAvoy manage to tease out the more subtle and enduring bits in their characters' unravelings.

Though the bag of tricks that Bruckner (V/H/S, The Ritual) digs through — the jump scares and shadow figures, the eerily suspended rules of gravity and physics — are familiar, he uses them to build a kind of clanging, feverish atmosphere. And British actress Hall (The Gift, Godzilla vs. Kong), tasked with carrying nearly every scene, grounds her performance in more than meat-puppet panic; her unraveling springs from genuine, furious grief.

Who can take a reboot, sprinkle it with something new, cover it with blood and bumblebees and a pointed social commentary or two? Candyman can, at least for a little while, even if the movie doesn't really find its more-than-body-horror groove in the end.

They'd be crazy not to give Meng'er Zhang, as Shang-Chi's ferociously watchable sister Xialing, her own spin-off, and Awkwafina, who spends at least a third of the movie in a fanny pack and lime-green parachute pants, polishes her sardonic slacker M.O. to a high one-liner shine.

Writer-director Lisa Joy (Westworld) seems to be aiming for an Inception-style metaphysical mind-bend, with the sci-fi jolt of Minority Report and a bleak splash of Waterworld. But her intentions get lost in some cloudy marine layer in between, sunk by hammy hard-boiled dialogue and a story that leaves logic at the door.

The result is undoubtedly a canny mediation on the vagaries of fame, but it feels more intimate and essential than that: a lifetime of searching and self-regard distilled, somehow, into a state of grace.

In a genre where winky self-awareness has become standard-issue, Free might have come off as manic and hollow; instead, it has fun having a heart.

In a way, the movie feels almost like Marvel antimatter, an auteur's willful response to whiz-bang emptiness and Infinity Stones. Knight is ultimately a tale of honor though, and a deeply moral one — inscrutable, but haunting too.

The script, accordingly, herks and jerks along with a sort of forced-festive glee, its mounting body count buffeted by goofball banter and pounding soundtrack cues. A good half of the jokes don't land, but unlike his predecessor's joyless slog, Gunn's version at least celebrates the nonsense.

Old comes close to seeing its metaphysical mystery through. In the end, though, it settles for something more like supernatural camp, with telegraphed twists and jump scares.

Is Annette a farce, a metaphor, a noir meditation on fame? Only God and maybe the Maels know for sure. But like so many of the best and strangest moments that festivals like this bring, it's nearly impossible to witness it all and not walk away feeling altered (irrationally, emotionally, chemically) in some way.

If Widow, with its winky one-liners and spandexed catsuits, is purely pop feminism, the movie's female gaze still reads like more than a cynical marketing ploy; it's one step closer to real, messy life, Marvel-size and amplified.

The story's bright swirl of Pixar pixie dust, jangle soundtrack, and gentle lessons on accepting otherness and learning to move past fear feel like a temporary passport: a sweetly soulful all-ages dip in la dolce vita.

Roadrunner, steeped in the jittery punk-rock style and verve of its famously omnivorous muse, registers as more than a requiem or a postscript. It feels like an essential document­, created in the radical no-reservations spirit in which he lived

Cruella comes off as a curious animal, eager to change its spots and trying a little bit of everything along the way.

For all its rich tapestry and radiant ingenues, it's that casual centering of so many marginalized voices that makes the movie feel, in its own way, revolutionary: a Technicolor marvel as heady as Old Hollywood, and as modern as this moment.

With [Crawford's] proud, wounded performance at the center, the film's raw vérité style and unforced naturalism do more than set a mood; in its best moments, it breaks your heart.

A kind of popcorn movie that doesn't just let wit and storytelling serve as the garnish for big-bang action, but makes that its actual priority.

A quirky bootstraps narrative of improbable small-town ambition and extremely regional accents designed not to rush its modest, affable charms.

Once again, Krasinski manages to render relatively straightforward tasks — nursing a baby, tuning a radio, walking through a train car — harrowing; dialogue, by necessity, is rarely wasted, and his actors feel far more sympathetically human and real than most meat-puppet horror chum.

The final 30 minutes of the film descend into something so bloody and outrageous it nearly works as camp. Still, it's hard not to think of the better movie buried somewhere in Window's odd feints and histrionics, if only its makers had trusted themselves — or been trusted — to tell it.

A film literally made from thin air, the French thriller Oxygen (on Netflix starting Friday) is a neat little sci-fi nightmare; a cool-toned exercise in claustrophobia that nearly pulls off the innate improbabilities of its high-concept nonsense.

Unlike Remorse, and other bloody misfires out this month, Dead isn't particularly ugly or offensive; it's engaging enough and sometimes almost unintentionally fun. For a star who so rarely chooses to be on screen these days though, it feels like another kind of mortal sin, at least in Hollywood: forgettable.

Wrath is just another loose bag of lizard-brain thrills and wood-block dialogue: too ugly to be camp, too grimly familiar to feel new.

The movie marches on in grim, silly lockstep to its themes: a compendium of jump-scare terrors almost exhaustively heard and seen, but rarely calibrated to make you feel much of anything at all.

Vengeance is wrought without remorse and even less sense. The only sure thing, judging by the promise of a post-credits scene, is a sequel.

Writer-director Ricky Staub brings real-life rhythms and texture to his feature debut by filling the screen with that homegrown scene, and casting several actual riders from the city's Fletcher Street Stables in supporting roles.

Enter Shiva at your own risk then: a hell of Danielle's own making maybe, but still a witty, jittery trip.

If you want a great monster movie that's actually also about people — how they think and talk and feel when they're more than just screaming kaiju chum in the water — try 2017's Colossal, currently streaming on Hulu. If not, maybe Godzilla vs. Kong's brawling lizard-brain shock and awe is exactly the void you came for.

Most illuminating are the various journalists, attorneys, witnesses, and admissions counselors who testify to the case

If Raya's outlines and endpoint are strictly fairy-tale familiar (evil is vanquished, good triumphs, reconstituted dragons romp), the movie feels fresh not just for the mere fact of its female-forward and predominately Asian cast, but for the breeziness with which it bears the weight of Disney history.

As her success spikes exponentially, so does the film's momentum, shifting toward the more familiar touchstones of a traditional music doc: The smear of foreign cities seen through a town-car window; the endless roundelay of interviews, meet-and-greets, and promo signings.

The skillfulness of the telling, paradoxically, can make The Father feel at times almost too painful to sit through; as the story shifts elliptically in and out of time, Anthony's losses become our own.

There's only so much real-world intrigue a crime committed almost entirely via ones and zeroes can entail, and the script's halfhearted attempts to make it all Mean Something feel more than a little callow in the end.

For all the frenzied action of the final scenes though, there's an airless, overwrought sense of diminishing returns — and that's a comedown we've seen too many times before.

Daniels has a way of molding the chaotic murk of history into something neat and shiny — whether it be the roots of Holiday's addiction or the decidedly 2021 cut of Rhodes' rippling torso.

Pike . . . feels unleashed by the wickedness of the role, gleefully sinking those gleaming white teeth into her finest villainy since Gone Girl. As the mercenary Marla — cool-eyed and indomitable, a razor blade poured into a buttercream blazer — she's delicious, a shiny-haired nihilist who couldn't care less if she tried.

The immersive look of the film, with its strikingly unadorned landscapes and dim-lit interiors, casts a spell, and Waterston (the Fantastic Beasts franchise) and Kirby (The Crown, Pieces of Woman), bring both urgency and fragility to their constrained characters — two lost souls aligned and finding love in a hopeless place.

Like some of the old-timey classics it recalls — Blazing Saddles, Airplane, the first Austin Powers — Barb and Star commits to its deep silliness so sweetly and completely that you can't help falling a little bit in love with them too.

Director Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) gives the movie both the global sweep of a thriller and the more granular details of a procedural, though in the end hardly any of it takes place in a courtroom.