Leah Greenblatt

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.

Wildly unsettling and original.

The film (shot mostly in Yiddish) has an unpolished intimacy, peeling back the surface exoticism of a cloistered faith to reveal the poignantly ordinary struggle of being an imperfect person in the world.

Durkin captures it all with a sort of menacing restraint, building a deeply disquieting mood from long, almost voyeuristic shots and loaded gazes.

Director Daniel Karslake (For the Bible Tells Me So) does that by homing in on singular tales — and letting them unfold largely without judgment or editorializing.

It’s a movie so well put together as a hero’s tale that it moves along almost too smoothly; the script by brothers Jez and John Henry Butterworth hits its marks of tragedy and triumph with a kind of shiny, measured inevitability.

In the sometimes overstuffed script there’s more than a touch, too, of the TV projects two of its stars are best known for: This Is Us (Brown) and Euphoria (Demie). If the pairing of those two wildly different shows sounds counterintuitive, it speaks, maybe, to how much Shults seems to want to fit into Waves both dramatically and style-wise. In end though, substance — or at least his sincere approximation of it — wins.

If the script’s epiphanies don’t feel quite as shocking or profound the second time around, it’s still pleasing to watch these beautiful, troubled people move through their equally beautiful spaces: something borrowed, something blue — and with Freundlich’s careful alterations, something new.

Officially, Knock follows four progressive female candidates, though the one who inevitably dominates is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx-bred waitress–turned–congressional unicorn. It’s a lot of fun to ride along on her wildly improbable rise, from slinging margaritas and scooping out ice buckets to taking down one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.

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.

The movie’s title, by the way, comes from the president’s own evaluation of his handling of the virus, a phrase he proudly repeated more than once.

For the most part it succeeds, gorgeously — though it will probably make anyone over 30 feel either mildly outraged or wildly irrelevant.

Pete is no kind of fairytale; instead, it’s something far sadder and better and more real.

Director Tom Harper (War & Peace) aptly conveys the single-mindedness that a life of art requires, and the double standard applied to the women who pursue it at the cost of other, seemingly more essential things. But it’s Buckley, wild and free, who makes the movie sing.

Hanks plays Fred as he lays: a sort of secular Buddha in a red knit cardigan whose gently probing questions and Zen proclamations work as a slow dissolving agent on Lloyd’s resistance.

A ramshackle, winningly raw coming-of-middle-age shot in vivid black and white but told in emotional Technicolor.

Welsh actor Pryce (Game of Thrones) is fantastic — a fussy, adulterous egoist in the Great Man mold of Norman Mailer or Philip Roth, with his own touchingly real frailties. But the movie belongs to Close, whose face, as she is courted and patronized, sexually betrayed and damned with faint praise, is a marvel of emotional intelligence and control.

There’s a loose, jazzy verve to the production, a sort of sonic and visual razzmatazz that gives the film a fanciful Oceans 11-style gloss. Mostly, though, Talk is just a chance to spend two hours watching Streep & Co. make the most of Deborah Eisenberg’s deliciously salty script, while Soderbergh — who also serves as cinematographer — shoots it all in ruthless, radiant light.

The story then becomes less a forensic accounting of a masterpiece than a bittersweet ode to a certain slice of old Hollywood: part love letter, part cautionary tale, and still somehow a mystery.

It’s the kind of film that leaves you dazzled and a little shell-shocked — and not entirely sure whether your own moviegoing DNA hasn’t been altered a little in the process.

Director Cory Finley (who also helmed 2017’s great, underappreciated "Thoroughbreds") brings a light touch to Mike Makowsky’s script, nimbly balancing broader comedy and pathos.

The movie finds real power in its climax, a party that turns into a nightmarish orgy of leering white kids in blackface. And the end-credit photos of real parties just like it at schools across the country are a stark reminder of the ugliness that Dear White People, flawed as it is, wants to confront.

At 160 stately, glacial minutes, it’s also an endurance test — one that can feel like its own act of faith to pass.

Cary Fukunaga’s stark, beautifully shot drama was likely never meant to be a blockbuster; its brutal account of a child soldier in an unnamed African country is far too discomfiting for wider audiences. It absolutely does belong on a big screen, though, and more important, it just deserves to be seen.

Instead of melodrama, the movie finds its traction in parsing out micro-aggressions and mood: a sort of devastating slow-drip portrait of the power structures that allowed a man like Weinstein to happen — and keep more like him in place, untouched by any justice a hashtag can reach.

Beneath all the chinchilla and body glitter, there’s a smart, beating heart.

Director Marc Turtletaub pulls thoughtful, carefully shaded performances from Denman, Khan, and, most of all, Scottish actress Macdonald (Boardwalk Empire, No Country for Old Men), who refuses to let Agnes be an easy avatar for midlife longing and suburban discontent.

Mikkelsen has become perhaps Denmark’s most familiar face Stateside over the past decade. But he still feels most in his skin in roles like these, and in Round’s final ecstatic scene, the actor does what only true stars seem able to: Take the silly or messy or improbable, and make it fly.

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

It’s like a lost John Hughes movie with Irish brogues and cars that just happen to drive on the other side of the road. It’s also, sadly, exactly the kind of sweet little film that too often gets buried in a box office ruled by broader comedies and bloated superhero epics

Buckley and Plemons are left to carry that water for much of I'm Thinking's 134-minute runtime, and they're both fantastically game, infusing the movie's heady concepts with a naturalism that borders on heroic.

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.

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.

Jenkins and a nearly unrecognizable Winger make the most of their small monsters, peeling back layers of callousness and calculation to hint at the messier motivations underneath.

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.

It’s a smart, flawed movie about smart, flawed people.

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.

Moore — vulnerable but undauntable — lives every moment in her skin, fantastic to the last glorious frame.

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

A raft of fine actors – including Amy Adams, Richard Jenkins, and Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay – are wasted in a sour, callow family drama that mistakes constant yelling for emotional tension and fortune-cookie aphorisms for wisdom.

As Wick carves a path of stoic destruction across several continents, the series' longtime director Chad Stahelski, once Reeves' Matrix stand-in and longtime stunt coordinator, gets down to the business of what he loves best: creative kills, far-flung zip codes, and incalculable body counts.

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

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.

The movie largely delivers, splashing its ambitious three-hour narrative across a sprawling canvas of characters, eras, and not-quite-insurmountable challenges.

Sisters gets sadder and more eccentric as it goes along, and the ending actually tugs sweetly on a few heart strings, though it’s also hard not to wonder why exactly, with all the Westerns already in the cannon, this movie got made — other than to give its crew of excellent actors a chance to put on their boots and ride off, cock-eyed and whimsical, into some kind of sunset.

Between "Moonlight" and the upcoming "Call Me By Your Name," some are calling this the golden age of gay coming-of-age cinema; Beach Rats’ slow pacing and dreamy verité style doesn’t feel made for quite that level of mainstream appeal. But still it gets under the skin, and stays there.

The film belongs to Chapman and more than anyone, MacKay, a 27-year-old Londoner with the long bones and baleful eyes of a porcelain saint or a lost Caulkin brother. His Lance Corporal Schofield isn’t just a surrogate Everyman; he’s hope and fear personified, and you couldn’t look away if you wanted to.

Clemency does what few other movies about death row have, handling a thorny, infinitely complicated subject in terms that are neither moralizing nor melodramatic. And Chukwu’s clean-lined storytelling has an undeniable pull; something quietly incandescent at the center. In the end though, it’s hard not to wish that she’d let a little more light in.

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.

Huppert is a wonder, inhabiting every iota of rage and froideur and helplessness; if only the movie's motives were as lucid as her performance.

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

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.

The result is chilling and beautifully composed, a stylish study of disintegration that is easier to admire than enjoy.

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.

In quiet, often dream-like interludes that frequently burst open into scenes of brutal verbal or physical violence, director Vincent Grashaw explores what it’s like to be Edwin, so battered by anxiety and anger and a crushing sense of unfairness that he hardly sleeps at night.

Stewart, who appears in nearly every scene, is intensely watchable, a coiled spring. But the movie is too fragmented and tonally strange to register as more than one of Maureen’s wispy, haunted apparitions.

Davis and "Bloodline" Emmy winner Mendelsohn, both Australian screen veterans, do the less glamorous work of being sad, angry adults, though it's often their ordinary grief that grounds the movie, even as their stories lean into the clichés of certain coping mechanisms (Pills! Infidelity! Bargaining with God!).

Heartbreaking, infuriating, and unmissable.

At nearly 140 minutes, the narrative takes its time wending toward a final, inevitable confrontation, and the incidents that punctuate it can sometimes feel like singularly ugly stations of the cross to be marked off; a series of random man- and nature-made cruelties meted out without pity.

Sam Elliott, Marcia Gay Harden, and Judy Greer supply sharp cameos, but this is Tomlin’s movie, and she obliges with a spiky, refreshingly unvarnished performance.

The skating scenes, too, are thrilling, but Robbie is the real revelation. In a performance that goes far beyond bad perms and tabloid punchlines, she’s a powerhouse: a scrappy, defiant subversion of the American dream. You won’t just find yourself rooting for this crazy kid; you might even fall a little bit in love.

If the setup feels quotidian, the tension still climbs steadily, egged on by Edna's increasing confusion and cognitive decline and Kay and Sam's conflicting ideas of what should be done about it. But it's the final scene, it turns out, that James has saved her chips for: a haunting tableau both gruesome and beautiful and somehow, full of love.

For all that lavish calibration, its beauty is a little remote, too — so beguiled by style that it forgets, or simply declines, to make us feel too much.

The whole thing is so wrapped in leaden dialogue and B-movie cliché that by the last weary, bloodletting hour, you'll envy Alex's ability to forget.

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.

A sincere effort to illuminate a singularly dark chapter in history — and a stark reminder of exactly what gets lost when human beings fail to take care of their own.

Thankfully, Fremon Craig’s script is smart and sensitive enough not to gloss over the real pain lurking beneath Nadine’s bravado as she deals with the aftermath of her dad’s death, her best friend’s betrayal, and the fact that the right guy (Hayden Szeto) might not be the one with the best bangs.

It feels only appropriate that James Franco, an actor and director for whom weirdness is next to godliness, would be the one to tell his story.

Sometimes that tips too far into silliness (the final scene, especially, works strenuously towards an end-cute); still, its mildly subversive rom-com sensibilities are just sour-sweet enough to pull it off.

Murphy...brings so much hope and hunger and pure life force to the role that he makes you believe in every punchline, pelvic thrust, and egregiously misplaced karate kick.

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.

Gourav is frankly devastating, his face a cracked mask of pain and disbelief. In others he's ruthless, calculating, even cruel. It's the kind of performance that can either make or break a movie like this, and the broad sweep of Tiger, with its cavalcade of outsize themes and incidents, sometimes threatens to overtake him. But through his eyes, Balram's singular story — in all its wild, exuberant improbability — roars to life

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.

Chicago 7 frames the past not just as entertaining prologue but a living document; one we ignore at our own peril.

Why end a rallying cry with a question mark? The devil is in the details, or at least in the punctuation of Hail Satan?, a movie that often seems to teeter on the line between doc- and mockumentary — a sincere examination of a social and political movement delivered with just a soupçon of Christopher Guest.

If Paige and Keogh weren’t both such indelible, fiercely charismatic characters, the whole thing could easily fall apart. But their presence, and Bravo’s singular vision, give Zola a sort of electric buzz: the thrill of watching something stranger than fiction, and somehow better than true.

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.

There’s a raw, tangible humanity to nearly every scene that sets the film gratifyingly apart.

If Eternity is hardly a completist portrait — or even a narratively satisfying one, really — it’s still gratifying to watch in other ways. Not just for the pureness of Dafoe’s performance but for the way it lets art be both celebrated and unexplained, still as much a mystery as the man who made it.

Despite a few too-cute moments (and many fantastically graphic vagina jokes), the movie is both smarter and more sympathetic than that glib shorthand.

If Hathaway and Ejiofor are sometimes saddled with talky theatrical monologues that sound far more like a screenwriter's fever dream than the words of any ordinary human, they also commit in a way that manages to makes the leaps in tone and logic work, probably better than they should.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The title of Loveless is no misnomer: It might just be the feel-bad movie of the year. A new word should be invented for the particular kind of poetic, politically-charged bleakness acclaimed filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, The Return) brings to the screen, some Cyrillic-alphabet cousin to the Germans with their weltschmerz and schadenfreude.

Noah Baumbach’s latest wisp of privileged New York whimsy vaporizes on arrival.

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.

Gyllenhaal, bright-eyed and brittle, brings her signature intensity to the role, though Lisa’s true inner world remains murky; it’s never quite clear if she’s just deeply unhappy or certifiably ill. Instead, the movie remains an intriguing but ambiguous portrait of a flawed, fascinating woman who knows herself either too well or not at all

An excellently clear-eyed primer on the woman whose talent carried her from an impoverished childhood in Tryon, N.C., to the world’s most rarefied stages—and whose political defiance nearly ended her career.

Extraction mostly delivers what its swaggering trailer promises: international scenery; insidious villains; a taciturn, tree-trunk Aussie. And the comfort of knowing that the kids — or at least the one he came for — are probably alright.

By trading in all its intrigue and emotional subtleties for the gotcha moment it’s clearly been waiting for, Tree wins the battle but loses the war.

As these vastly different men parry, spar, and circle one another, Meirelles’ intimately talky two-hander — not counting, depending on how you might choose to qualify these things, a third invisible hand upstairs — works with wit and quiet humor to demystify perhaps the most powerful and insular post in the world.

The movie is more than a bonfire of the inanities; it’s a shrewd indictment of a dream gone spectacularly, criminally wrong.

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

Its title sounds like the premise for some kind of high-adrenaline adventure about maze-running or outgunning a nuclear apocalypse. But The Escape is both less thrilling and much scarier, in its own way — a quiet domestic-drama chamber piece with a vein of pure desperation thrumming beneath it.

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

By the time the narrative comes to Colvin’s greatest get — she was essentially the first Western journalist to get inside Homs and refute Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s bold-faced lie that he wasn’t bombing his own people into oblivion — the price of that sacrifice, and the power of her story, feels finally, fully real. Whatever her private battles, War works hard to be the public reckoning her work deserves.